AMD reviews

Death by weekly or daily meetings. AMD people spend a lot of time talking about what they'd like to do, but there's no motivation to reprioritize. Everyone spends so much time in meetings and bureaucracy that rather than being a culture of efficiency, it's a culture of spinning wheels. No one is willing to stop what they're doing to focus on more important issues. What's more, the management is structured to prevent you from doing anything of the sort. AMD also puts as much burden of policies and paperwork on Manager level and below as they can so as to relieve the stress on upper ranks. AMD is bleeding money in lost productivity among the individual contributors and is blissfully ignorant as to the cost of lost productivity from this approach.

The constant instability; when things are going well you can always assume it will turn around. There was not much consistency in the overall roadmap and changes came late in projects. Also, the marketing names did not match up with the internal codenames which did not match the silicon designers' names so you had to know 3 sets of names depending on the audience. That got frustrating after awhile. Also, the culture of secret management was a turn-off. There was a lot of information that could not be disseminated down to the engineers, who often ended up doing work that the could have avoided with some information that was available but not passed on.