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Intel Ireland Experiences?

[Deleted User]

Hey all,

Recent masters graduate here and have an interview for Process Engineer in Litho at Intel Lexlip next week.
Reading through the forum and seen a few posts but majority seem to relate to 5-6years ago and its "prison camp" atmosphere.

Anybody with any recent experience working in the place?
Anybody working in a similar role?
Any experience with the current interview process?
Idea of starting salary for this position?
etc etc

Big reasons for asking really is that I have a role lined up in the same industry in mainland Europe and im trying to way up pros and cons etc.

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[Deleted User]

Might try this again

Bagenal

Hey Dazz, I never worked there myself but a relative did a few years ago from what I gather it's a fairly strict regime there but in the times we're in it would be a job if you got in. It might be easier to get another job if you are working and have experience. I say go for it. Best of luck

Tom Dunne

I left Intel a few years back, but I would categorically reject the idea that it is a prison camp.

Yes, they work you hard and yes, they are extremely particular about policies and procedures, however I would argue that is why they are so successful/dominant in the market. They reward loyalty and good staff and provide tremendous opportunities. It is an American company, and there is a lot of American bullsh*t, however, it can be a great place to work.

And I have to say that the experience I got there has really stood to me in my career (I worked in IT).

kkelly77

Tom Dunne wrote: »

They reward loyalty and good staff .........

That's not true at all. Over 7 yrs experience of it.

syklops

From my experience of it, you either love it or hate it. I hated it. The funny thing is, the people who love it dont understand the ones who hate it and vice versa. I saw two best friends go in to work there, they started school the same day, and started work at intel the same day. Did everything together all their lives. One loved it the other hated it.

I don't think any of us can tell you if you will like it, you will just half to wait and see.

ChrisM

How did the interview go?

[Deleted User]

ChrisM wrote: »

How did the interview go?

Better then expected... got a job offer only 2 days later!

Three 1-hour interviews with 3 different engineers in different departments (litho, etch, thin films).
Pretty much a mixture of technical questions (Mosfet, Lasers, semiconductor processes) and behavioral questions ( Describe a challenging situation you have experienced, describe a situation where you have had to meet deadlines etc).

RachyPie

Hi guys,

Had an interview with Intel last Friday for an 11 month internship. Still haven't heard anything back. Does anyone know how long they usually take to get back to candidates, and do they inform you even if you have been unsuccessful?

leeroybrown

In my experience their recruiters (for Lexilip) were pretty good when it comes to dealing with people. I'd expect them to let you know if you'd been unsuccessful. This time of year the thing to remember is that it's summer holiday season and quite a few of more senior managers could be taking holidays. Your hire could easily be dependent on their decision and signature even if they didn't interview you and you'll have to wait until they're back if it is.

As regards working there, it depends on the person. If you're what's referred to as "an Intel man" (women included) you'll fit in fine and you might even like the place. If you're not then you may fall into the other camp who don't like the place. Personally, I didn't like the work or the working environment and left.

JustAThought

I'd be asking what status contract you will have; from memory there were blue badgE contracts,, green badge,yellow badgers, pink badge and a few others; all had different pay scales and contract types. This used to be on your employee ID as a banner above your picture and you had to wear it visible around your neck at all times...
I agree with the others; it suites some and not others. But it is an international brand and that opens doors worldwide later.
One of my strongest unpleasant memories is the smell of cabbage And the great unwashed leeching along the corridors as the air conditioning clung to all and any smells and circulated them for weeks; you couldn't open any internal windows. Also one year there was a disgusting face sore virus in the building.. Literally; you could see whole departments with it;'really disgusting .
They used to have a policy of promoting automatically from the factory floor which meant that you boss could have a fairy basic level of education and be in charge while really not having much of a clue, but they had then a good employee assistance Programme for education; but then it was only if you had blue badge status. There used be a gym; concrete block no windows; but again only blue badges could attend.. Same with Christmas parties etc...
I don't know how much it's changed now.
Best of luck with your decision but I wouldn't be turning down s good job with an international brand unless the trade off was for something very good.
Lots of people there; you re bound to find someone you like with a common mindset to help make it a mire fun experience.
Subsidised canteen.

dobsdave

JustAThought wrote: »

I'd be asking what status contract you will have; from memory there were blue badgE contracts,, green badge,yellow badgers, pink badge and a few others; all had different pay scales and contract types. This used to be on your employee ID as a banner above your picture and you had to wear it visible around your neck at all times...
.

Blue badge is for Intel employees,
Green badge is for contractors/Non Intel.

doolox

I spent 14 years in Intel and would take it with a great deal of caution.
It is not a place for people with any degree of ambiguity in their commitment to their chosen career. You must be prepared for constant learning and development. Keep records of everything you do. Treat it like you would a job in Pharma or Aircraft Maintenance, heavily regulated and controlled and your job on the line if you screw up.....

Environmentally I found the FAB hell, hot and stuffy and no sign of the outside for 13 hours at a time. I started work there in PC motherboard repair for customer returns. This was hell with tight deadlines and a huge turnover in technician staff as a result.

Intel is as bad for engineering staff as there is a highly competitive athmosphere with dog eat dog, informers everywhere and witch-hunts a regular experience. Be prepared to have a thick skin and take criticism without anger in order to survive.

leeroybrown

Another thing I'd add is that a lot of how you perceive Intel will be based on who you work for. If your supervisor/manager is decent you'll be working in a no-bull**** environment but you'll be treated reasonably ok. If your supervisor/manager is an arsehole or dislikes you then you'll not have nearly as fun a time. Most people I knew who got on well in manufacturing there had reasonably thick skins and knew how to look out for themselves.

x in the city

doolox wrote: »

I spent 14 years in Intel and would take it with a great deal of caution.
It is not a place for people with any degree of ambiguity in their commitment to their chosen career. You must be prepared for constant learning and development. Keep records of everything you do. Treat it like you would a job in Pharma or Aircraft Maintenance, heavily regulated and controlled and your job on the line if you screw up.....

Environmentally I found the FAB hell, hot and stuffy and no sign of the outside for 13 hours at a time. I started work there in PC motherboard repair for customer returns. This was hell with tight deadlines and a huge turnover in technician staff as a result.

Intel is as bad for engineering staff as there is a highly competitive athmosphere with dog eat dog, informers everywhere and witch-hunts a regular experience. Be prepared to have a thick skin and take criticism without anger in order to survive.

just what i expected from intel actually.

id rather work in a sewer than there.

Tom Dunne

doolox wrote: »

It is not a place for people with any degree of ambiguity in their commitment to their chosen career. You must be prepared for constant learning and development. Keep records of everything you do. Treat it like you would a job in Pharma or Aircraft Maintenance, heavily regulated and controlled and your job on the line if you screw up.....

I'm not actually seeing the problem here. Do you honestly see constant learning as a problem? Do you see accountability as a problem? Do you see rules and regulations as a problem?

As for your job on the line, the company has very clear and unambiguous disciplinary procedures. They don't (and legally cannot) just fire you for screwing up.

doolox wrote: »

Environmentally I found the FAB hell, hot and stuffy and no sign of the outside for 13 hours at a time.

So are you saying the company flouted employment laws by not permitting you breaks during your 13 hours?

doolox wrote: »

Intel is as bad for engineering staff as there is a highly competitive athmosphere with dog eat dog, informers everywhere and witch-hunts a regular experience.

Informers? Witch hunt? Just where exactly did you work?

doolox wrote: »

Be prepared to have a thick skin and take criticism without anger in order to survive.

American culture encourages robust, direct discussion. Would you rather people pussy-footed around and made no decisions (as I have seen occur in other places I have worked).

From your post above, it is clear you came over from the now defunct ESSM. That was a totally different environment, low-tech, manual, high-volume. In my experience, you were not the only one who came over from ESSM and faced a culture shock in the Fab environment.

As others have said, the company tends to be somewhat polarising - it suits some, it doesn't suit others.

doolox

I found it a very difficult and demanding place to work in, it does not necessarily mean they were breaking laws or being bad employees, just that their employment ethos, corporate culture etc I found hard to accept and agree with.

The indoors work environment all the time I also found depressing and hard to deal with. I started my working life as a milkman, outdoors all the time in all weathers, 5 am starts 7 days a week but the days were short, it was a doddle compared to working in the FAB in bunnysuits sweating all the time and forced to wear heavy Safety boots until your toenails soften up and fall off.... it didn't suit me.

No windows in the work areas was also a drag.

Trying to do complicated manual work wearing layers of latex and cotton gloves was a bind.

Trying to see through layers of fogged up safety glasses and Dryden Helmets was also a bind.

Trying to remember a dozen different passwords for the different systems in use was also a bind for my unorganised mind and also was a cause of many delays for me and others in the perfomance of our tasks.

The Day/night shift pattern was also difficult for many of the younger employees for whom a social life and free weekends are important but I found the changeover from days to nights physically hard.

I have been told that an employee who gets a performance rating of *does not meets* 3 times in a row can be fired so I disagree with your assertion that an employee cannot be fired for making mistakes. I managed to hang on until the 2nd or 3rd Voluntary package was on offer then got out when I had enough of the place after 12 years and 4 months of service.

MiseEireannach

Spent 2 years in Fab24. Would agree it's a love it or like it place. Pay and general conditions are good. Atmosphere is not so good. Lots of lickarses in high positions - the head man is a plonker so this permeates down. Dog eat dog atmosphere in the worst possible way. Daily 'TacOps' meeting are often public hangings. Lots of bull**** 'cover your arse' emails and reports - its all about perception and playing the game. People managers have a 'distribution' to hit such that a percentage of employees have to be given a negative appraisal and effectively 'managed out of the org' - not officially of course. This can hugely depend on your boss and whether he/she is an 'Intelite' or not. I saw lots of honest workers targeted and lazy cute hoors do well. Lots of hypocrisy and double speak about what they do for employees versus what they say they do! Posters hanging around the place proclaim 'A great place to work', 'our employees are our greatest asset' etc which is sickener if you're at the receiving end of a political 'below expectations' review that you don't deserve. The ongoing training requirements are real bull**** and most of it isn't even relevant to your job but just to keep HR and training people in their jobs. I wouldn't consider it an efficiently run operation but because Intels margins are so huge they get away with it. Absolutely no room for individuality or expression unless you're propagating the worst aspects of the Intel culture. I wouldn't say not to take the job but go in with your eyes open, be prepared to play the game and to learn to ignore the Intel bull****.

doolox

These were the things that I found just as bad in Intel. We were supposed to get a certain amount of stuff out in a certain amount of time. Almost always meetings and training course time was "forgotten" about by the supervisors in performance meetings and had to be accounted for after accusations about "falling" performance when the original full 12 hours was factored in. It was so bad that a lot of Techs skipped meetings rather than lose production time or fall behind on what was expected in a given time frame. A lot of the meetings were irelevant to the ordinary techs, with sometimes only 5 minutes of meaningful contribution in an hours meeting from a tech, this should have been handled by the supervisor as a delegate but the managers wanted big numbers at their meetings to some political end.

At one stage the overall boss sent out an edict for every employee, regardless of rank, to challenge their obligation to attend meetings and issued guidelines regarding length of contribution, relevance of meeting to employee, presence of alternative means of passing info etc. to reduce the amount of meetings and the time lost to them. This was largely ignored.

In the early days a lot of time was spent on generating fancy spreadsheets and word documents when a simple one would do, no account was taken of the hours ordinary Techs would spend in generating these artful masterpieces where the style of the message was more important than the content or the intended audience.

Any extra activity such as Emergency Response Team meetings and courses were a source of "turf wars" between supervisors and higher HR management and forced many employees to give up participation in ERT activities because it was perceived by many to jeapourdise their good standing with their immediate supervisor, anything that caused trouble was to be avoided. Likewise with taking part in externally provided further education courses even if they were approved and funded by the company, many supervisors saw them as getting in the way of immediate production goals. Perhaps there was also a sense of jealousy and rivalry on the part of the supervisors for the student taking part in the course. Time taken for these activities was often resented and had to be fought for. Study time and Exam time is what I mean.

The only way to approach Intel is to know your rights and research everything in company policy online and be prepared to fight your ground to the highest level using their system. Do not rely on immediate superiors or colleagues to do this for you.

syklops

As for your job on the line, the company has very clear and unambiguous disciplinary procedures. They don't (and legally cannot) just fire you for screwing up.

Thats a very naive thing to say.

Jarren

The only reason a friend of main left Intel was Day/Night shift pattern,other than this he always spoke very highly about the company.During his time with the company he was transferred to US and UK for a few months.It was 11 years ago though:o

Tom Dunne

syklops wrote: »

Thats a very naive thing to say.

That's a very vague thing to say.

syklops

Tom Dunne wrote: »

That's a very vague thing to say.

They don't (and legally cannot) just fire you for screwing up.

While, yes, there are laws in place to protect employees, if a company decides they want to get rid of someone they will. I have seen it all too many times. Shifts will get messed about, promised promotions and bonuses will disappear, meeting times will be suddenly changed. I am not just talking about Intel either. It happens all through the public sector.

Dave_Kilkenny

Just seems like most american company's, if you have any relatives or friends working in America ask them, hours are long, work is hard and holidays are short.
Although its all about meeting production goals and deadlines. If you meet them you are rewarded if you don't your not. Its work? Isn't that the point to meet your company's goals.

I'm not saying a company should keep you in a light-less dungeon and pay you exceptionally when you meet goals. But what I am saying is that if you can enjoy working for a company doing your job fair enough but don't expect a paid holiday in any american company, their won't be much sitting on your arse waiting for customers then working constant work to a consistently high standard is what the company is paying you for so why not provide that service to them.

I've a friend who lost his job with Pat the Baker and got a job in Aldi the following week, he was shocking with the amount of work that he was expected to do. Deadlines daily and not a moment to have a break beside the allotted breaks. Personally I think Ireland should embrace this culture of hard work equal to reward maybe our country wouldn't be in this "mess" if more people did. And when I say hard work I say work hard in a job that you can enjoy not something you'll find a misery.

syklops

I didnt have a problem working hard there. It was the "looking busy" attitude I couldn't stand. Its just as tiring looking busy as it is actually working. But when the stocker breaks down, and there is no work to do, having to still 'look busy' just irritates me.

doolox

...I call it cant and hypocrisy and it is just downright dishonest.

I remember when stuff like that happened and some part of essential infrastructure broke down and we had to "look busy" to keep some jumped up little Hitler happy. I was lucky that I could invent some "audit" that needed "urgent attention" or some "report" needed by a distant but high ranking manager.

The trick is to always have some amount of tasks to do that aren't essential or tied to a deadline but make you look like a "team player".

Two screen web browsing is another trick. Have work related stuff on a screen behind the one you are REALLY viewing, to be brought to the front when anyone hovers into view..........

If you possibly can get out of the FAB when outages like this occur, its impossible to "look busy" in the FAB, much easier in the office bullpen.