Intel Ireland Experiences?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.