Stay away from post silicon teams if you value work life balance. - Senior Engineer AMD Employee Review

1.0
Feb 5, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

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.

Cons

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.

Explore other reviews about AMD

4.0
Apr 13, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

It's a big company. So, a lot of great benefits and high pay. Also, a lot of opportunity for career advancement and internal transfers if a particular job/team doesn't fit (to avoid losing RSUs). Plus, they're not too hard on you regarding performance since all the performance reviews are qualitative rather than quantitative (that could be both a pro and a con, honestly).

Cons

It's a big company. So, a lot of bureaucracy. They get in the way of themselves requiring endless approvals for spending. Also small organizations within AMD being territorial about their particular domain rather than being as open as possible inhibits rapid progress. Also, pushing for "diversity and inclusion" is racist. They should ignore race, not try to have a representative sampling of the population. I give them a low score there because DEI is racist. But not minimal because it's only something the HR dept cares about, normal employees effectively ignore race from what I can tell. So even if management is woke, the company (the individuals) are not.

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