software engineer

design engineer

senior design engineer

intern

product development engineer

AMD is a company that is struggling to recover, and it’s doing itself no favors by consistently laying off its employees. The culture has become one of desperation. Whether you’re new, or have been there for years, you never know when you department might be “consolidated” and your position eliminated.

The layoffs are made worse by weeks of anticipation. It’s not infrequent that the CEO will announce layoffs (internally), then allow several weeks to pass for handing down notices. During that interim, things come to a screeching halt as everyone waits to find out whether or not they still have a job. Some departments become ghost towns as layoffs approach and people begin “working” from home.

Departments that exceed quarterly projections are still subject to “restructuring.” Even success is no promise of job security.

Many employees are constantly applying to other, more stable, companies. Nothing is worse than being caught by surprise right before the Holidays.

Over time, all of this has made the culture toxic.

Job Work/Life Balance:
There is no Work/Life Balance at AMD. Employees who want to keep their jobs are forced to live at the office.

Compensation/Benefits:
Salaries are not particularly competitive, benefits are mediocre, and the likelihood of earning a bonus is zero.

Job Security/Advancement:
With the constant restructuring, there is very little job security. Advancement and “promotions” often happen as a result of someone else being laid off.

Management:
Not long ago, poor management and lack of vision nearly sank to company. Things have improved little since.

Job Culture:
Management likes to tout an AMD culture that doesn’t exist anymore. Employees are constantly competing with each other to keep from being the one who is laid off, and everyone is looking for a way out.

AMD in itself is a good company with great products and a great CEO. However, my experience as an engineer was not so great. The main problem lies with middle management. Unfortunately, my manager had no regard or interest in my professional growth -- he wouldn't provide any meaningful feedback on my performance even after multiple requests, no one-on-one meetings, kept me working on the same things for 6 years with no scope of learning anything new even though I kept on requesting, minimal raise and absolutely no recognition. Favoritism and politics are rampant. People are generally nice on the surface, but cold. I felt like a cog in the wheel and ultimately ended up leaving the company (or more correctly, my manager).

On the plus side, benefits are good and the pay is okay. The company has been doing well and is under capable leadership. The work environment isn't bad in general and quite often HR would host fun events and stuff. While work-life balance isn't that great, I have had far worse experiences. However, AMD works on cutting edge technology and products, so while there is potentially opportunity to learn new and interesting things, almost all tasks are very partitioned and made limited in their scope. I guess that's kind of the nature of a big and mature company, but chances are that one will probably end up getting assigned a small part of the design and not learn a whole lot. Overall, it's not a bad place to work at, as long as you are lucky enough to get a manager who actually cares.

AMD has great technology, a lot of smart engineers, interesting area to work in technicality.   If that was the entire view of a company, then I would have given it 5 stars.     The issues at AMD has more to do with its compensation and reward culture than on the technical front.   Management don't hire enough competent engineers who are doing the actual work, instead, they hire "senior" members that actually don't do the day to day work.   You are not rewarded based on the amount of work you do or the quality of work you do, instead you get rewarded for "politics".   There are some great engineers but they are often not rewarded for their work vs mediocre senior engineers that don't do anything other than code reviews or filing jira tickets.

Work-life balance:  Due to lack of management, any issue becomes a priority one issue and you're expected it solve it yesterday.  As a result, "unexpected" work on weekends happen quite often.

It's hard to say about compensation since the stock has gone so well in the past few years but it remains to be seen if AMD will be able to sustain it.   But don't expect tier one general compensation.

I actually like the CEO, she has saved AMD from the abyss of 2012/2013.  The direction and technical work is definitely interesting if you put in the time to learn and in large part is due to her leadership to shift the focus of AMD into areas and beating Intel at the same time.



Too many products getting created without any consideration for quality, documentation, or supporting software. As the company grows larger in size everyone finds an excuse to not do their work pointing fingers everywhere else so if anything needs to get done get ready to pick up everyone else’s work on top of your own. My worry is the company is going to implode and the stock price will be not good or I won’t have a job. Upper management doesn’t care about this and doesn’t listen to people doing the actual work as they seem to work in a different universe.

AMD needs to beef up their marketing as  9/10 people have no clue who AMD is, which doesn’t help our client business. Who’s going to buy something they don’t know about?

Benefits are not great compared to other tech companies. With the crazy workload it’s almost impossible to take vacation and when you come back get ready for a couple of 80 hours a week just to barely catch up. Pay is on the very low end compared to other tech companies. As not all companies give a bonus, AMD does which is great but the uppers give  no formula how this is calculated. Last year we did “awesome” and worked my buns off but bonus was horrible.

Layoffs happen ALL the time but upper management likes to hide them as they always tout “We never lay people off.” Again, uppers are not in the same universe.

All in all if you don’t want to be a workaholic, depressed, and drained all the time please take your skills elsewhere.

Your overall work-load and career advancement opportunities really depend on what team you are a part of in Global Ops and what your rank is. After being hired at the most entry-level position in the Product Planning group, I was eager to work and take on new tasks, get recognized, and move up quickly. I felt that the first manager I had did not support my ambitions and actually tried to restrict me from taking on more responsibility. After 3 months I had a new manager and she seemed a little more invested in finding opportunities for me to grow, but I have also had 3 different directors in the span of 1.5 years and they have all seemed relatively unconcerned with helping me move up.

I am constantly frustrated by the lack of process documentation and standardization across the company which makes the random, urgent requests difficult to accomplish and to measure one's performance against. The days are unpredictable. You could be spending an entire day trying to find productive things to do or you could be bombarded with requests that keep you from doing your daily tasks and then have last minute evening (and morning) calls with the team in Taiwan.

The Toronto site typically doesn't pay much as the other established companies in the Semiconductor space, so that is a massive disadvantage. Furthermore, the quality of your work and life, in general, will be dependent on how your team is like. During my experience at AMD, my team was very detached and people didn't talk to each other. You would only be approached for questions or concerns related to work. A typical day would be just working for 12 hours (no overtime pay)  on your computer desk and heading back home. 
Furthermore, I was hired for position X, but on my first day, the position was switched to Y, even though my expertise lied in position X. I was told to wait for 1.5-2 years before I can transition to position X. That was just abysmal on AMD's part! Steer clear of some of the teams in Toronto - I have heard the work culture in the States is generally better! Most of the people hired in this office are UofT students (as part of a 12-16 month PEY program) and for them, this is the best company in the world - this is just because many of them don't get an opportunity to visit other parts of North America (as an intern) and try other professions/tech companies. The company is making strides forwards but barely any of that could be attributed to the Canadian office!

Organize, maintain paper and electronic files; manage projects.
Do basic research, schedule reservations, book travels and meetings,Coordinating office's administrative activities and store, retrieve information. Integrate information for dissemination to staff and clients. Act as proxy, representing him in meetings or communications.
A typical day was more along the lines of being an assistant for a financial analyst. Helpings with gathering sales information and distributing vital information among corporate personele. 
Since I was working as an assistant, I hardly had to answer to work with management. I worked closely in relation with Boss and established a very well relationship that proved to work well for us. 
The hardest part of the job was proving myself in the financial industry/sales when my background is that of Medicine. 
I enjoyed every aspect of the job because it helped me grow and strive to better myself among corporate level employees. I was able to prove to me and my co workers that with hard work and tenacity, I could rise to the occasion if need be. 

There is a clear lack of organization and very poor management. Your everyday schedule is filled with wasteful meetings that could have been avoided with better organization and a few emails. Instead of addressing the fundamental issues, we waste more time in even more meetings looking for band-aid solutions.

Routinely multiple teams get assigned with the same task. It is not unusual for a closed task to be redone because no one bothered to check whether it was already completed. And then we have meetings to discuss why we have multiple people doing the same thing. Followed by meetings to follow up on the meeting. And more meetings when it happens again. And again. And again.

All the disorganization translate to constant scrambling around trying to meet deadlines, resulting in lacking work quality, which is evident from your first week of working at AMD.

Expect to be involved in never-ending fire drills resulting in constant 60+ hour work weeks. There is no overtime pay, and zero appreciation or recognition of you wasting your entire weekend working on yet another fire drill.

When I worked for AMD, they were struggling to keep their heads afloat and just signed deals to become the chipmakers for the leading consoles. They had dodged a bullet. It was still an insecure and immature place to work at. Fear permeated every decision. 

Now that Ryzen is finally challenging Intel's dominance in a realistic way, that tide might have turned. I am just not there to see it at the moment. 

AMD is a company that has been counted out, risen from the ashes and done it all over again, again and again. That said, I didn't meet too many people, including Engineers, who had been with AMD for the long haul. The board of directors is what keeps that company alive on life support during the lean times and fit during the fat times. But they can't seem to maintain consistency long term. There is always a hope for a god machine to come in at the last minute to save the place instead of building a sustainable long term strategy that works and inspires trust inside and out. 

All that said, they are hot right now and I'd definitely go back to help them again.

AMD is a awesome company. I truly enjoyed working there. My path to this position was earned literally from the ground up. I began selling AMD processors at a distributor with literally no market share and computer experience.  I built a very large and dynamic distribution channel network in a very short amount of time. This was easily the most gratifying experience in my professional career.  
The thing I enjoyed most about this job is that in this position I could use my deep understanding of my customer base to develop and pitch ideas to upper management at AMD. I developed "program concepts" that would lead to more revenue in my channel. At AMD I was able to get the audience and interest from product marketing and sales marketing to financially support my concepts.  This lead to regional growth from 5 million to 20 million in my three year stint. 

The culture, management and opportunities to develop at AMD are outstanding.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Software engineer 122 salaries reported	$197,193 per year
Design engineer 118 salaries reported	$198,310 per year
Senior design engineer 46 salaries reported	$173,502 per year
Intern 3 salaries reported	$43.67 per hour
Product development engineer 40 salaries reported	$165,339 per year

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