Pros
Some teams have healthy cultures. Some technical work is cutting-edge. It's a friendly atmosphere. AMD is never too formal. Flex time is possible so long as you're delivering stuff. There's often good collaboration across teams / sites / functions. Not much red tape. Work/life balance is fine in my experience, 40 hours will usually do it on most teams. Not a lot of crazy pie-in-the-sky research projects -- everyone's work is directly related to products. And we do ship a lot of products, they are in people's hands.
Cons
Some teams have unhealthy cultures: some are documentation-free, some are led by bullies. A few entire teams are deadwood. Some very senior bullshitters have built empires for themselves, and you don't want to cross them. Some parts of the company are an old-boy network, and some of the old boys don't hardly deserve their privilege. Revolving door senior management. Revolving door strategic plans. Annual layoffs and titanic-deck-chair-rearranging exercise. There are big upcoming debt payments, so a major future restructuring seems unavoidable. There's been brain drain, and less mature people have been promoted to fill the gaps, this has led to coworker quality issues on some teams. No accountability. Nobody ever gets in trouble for missing deadlines, low quality deliverables. It's good enough right? AMD can be democratic in the worst way. We can't do something unless everyone agrees, but we have to keep talking about it if anyone wants to do it. So there are a lot of "efforts" where 25 people get called to a weekly meeting to discuss some vague future process improvement which never goes anywhere. To survive, you have to develop a good sense of which efforts are fictitious and ignore them or decline participation.
