Innovative, technical, and flexible workplace with lower management flaws
Pros
Open and direct communication in between senior management and employees. Every quarter CEO and multiple senior VP and business group leaders engage employees via open forums, webcasts, and business update meetings, where employees are free to ask whatever is on their mind. Excellent benefits package (okay perhaps not compared to Google), with free dental plans, a wide variety of medical insurance plans, decent (but not free) cafeteria food, and very flexible (albeit sometimes demanding) work schedule. Employees tend to stay for long term (a rarity in Silicon Valley), with most individual contributors being intensely technical and happy to help each other. Innovation and creativity is generally encouraged and rewarded (although there are short-sighted lower managers throughout the company that just want to do as they are told and go home). Higher level management is generally good, and underperforming managers and employees do get pink slips from time to time.
Cons
Lower management is full of undeserving and incompetent managers that cannot lead, communicate, or do technical work. Most small managers rose through the ranks as Intel expanded throughout the 90s and early 2000s, and many cannot lead or even communicate clearly. Career growth is limited, as Intel prefers to promote within, and with the company not expanding at the moment, it's next to impossible to move upward.
