Pros
Comparable salary. Good benefits. Main campus is nearby BART station. Coworkers can be very interesting. Colleagues help one another, especially in the lab or when facing a tough problems.
Cons
Work/life balance at Lam is non-existent. Expected to work long hours and weekends with no appreciation or recognition since it's the norm at the company. You have to handle multiple projects at once so there's little time to learn about anything in depth, you only have time to execute experiments and organize data on slides. Boring, repetitive work. - cleaving, preparing wafers/samples, sitting around waiting for experiment to be complete, preparing samples for analysis. Some days you can end up spending more than 6 hours (or more) in the lab - very hard on your legs and back. Toxic work environment and culture. Everyone is stressed out all the time, so the smallest thing upset other employees. There are long queues to use equipment, so when it's Friday afternoon and the machine is booked until 2am people tend to get upset. They have little patience for a poor presentation , but you barely have time to make ANY presentation since you're always in the lab or doing measurements somewhere. Highly competitive and very stressful. You work fast without any breaks so you tend to make mistakes, and the managers remember all of it. It can be very political and usually the VP/director favorites are the ones to get the good bonus/RSU's; everyone else get peanuts.