Pros
1. ESPP is nice. 2. Vacation days increase from 15 days to up to 25 days based on service time. 3. Your experience depends on the team you end up on. Stay away from post silicon teams in general if you value work-life balance. 4. Free parking on site. Lots of good restaurants near the office.
Kontras
1. Overtime is expected and is considered normal (60+ hours per week). Get prepared to give up most of your evenings, weekends and holidays. Note that this does not mean your efforts will be appreciated or that you will advance in your career faster. Some senior employees even work through vacation days. 2. Management does not care about employees. Constantly looking to make employees work through weekends, christmas break etc. with no additional pay or days back in lieu. Middle management blames senior management by saying these are requests cascaded from the top. 3. Pay is the lowest in the industry. Competition (Intel/NVIDIA) pays significantly higher. For example, the base salary of a new grad at Intel is more than a senior engineer at AMD. 4. Look out for "recharge days" through out the year. These recharge days come directly out of your vacation days. Sometimes a recharge day might fall on a friday which you take off and burn a vacation day, and then you might be expected to come in on the saturday to work. You do not get any additional pay or a day off in lieu for coming on a saturday. 5. You'll notice that a lot of junior employees/new grads have lead positions. This is management trying to squeeze as much juice as possible while paying the lowest possible salaries. 6. Some teams can be cliquey. Some managers fraternize with some direct reports ( hanging out constantly outside of work ) which is completely unprofessional and leads to favouritism. If you're not part of this inner circle, you get passed over for promotions or higher raises. 7. Female CEO but women face constant sexism. Women coming back from maternity leave lose their progress in advancing to the next level. Women taking their full maternity leave entitlement get shamed/talked about behind their back (as if maternity leave is a vacation). In the last women's day event held by the company, the guest speakers included caucasian male executives which many women raised as distasteful. 8. High turnover of experienced employees over the past year.