research associate

manufacturer's representative

manufacturing associate

manufacturing engineer

assembler

Agilent Technologies

Agilent, now Keysight, has long dominated the high frequency electronics test and measurement industry in the USA and worldwide.  Electronic Test & Measurement instrumentation was the initial focus of the corporation and HP computers were originally developed explicitly to control their instruments in order to sequence through measurement steps and retrieve and analyze test data.  These computers were designed specifically for this purpose along with their custom CPUs and proprietary operating system HP BASIC, which was also the programming language.  Their printer business, similarly, was created to provide printed output capabilities to support reporting and graphing of test results - this started with pen plotter machines and ultimately produced laser-jet and finally ink-jet technologies.  All the computing and printing technologies were byproducts of the need to facilitate automated test and measurement systems. 

Many years later they had provided the instruments and test automation capabilities that the United States and most of the world relied upon for R&D and manufacturing for all academic, commercial, government, and military applications.  They additionally were independent developers of new technology across a wide realm, including the high power colored LEDs that now are ubiquitous components of street signs and traffic lights, many advances in integrated circuit technologies and capabilities, printer technologies including laser-jet and ink-jet technologies, and have developed and dominated a vast host of chemical analysis, genetic analysis, medical and blood analysis technologies and products upon which our world relies and is propelled forward by.  HP was a massive, iconic powerhouse in terms of technology - the technology that drove and changed American and world cultures, lifestyles, health, communications, scientific and medical capabilities, and progress.

HP broke up in 1999 spawning a home computer company that took their name and leaving a high technology company that included all the other centers for high frequency electronic test and measurement, medical instrumentation, genetic research technologies, chemical analysis technologies and instruments, integrated circuit and chip technologies and products, etcetera.  These organizations were hosted under the new corporation Agilent Technologies.

The formation of Agilent Technologies was quickly followed by the DOT-COM market crash that devastated many of their customers and choking their cash flow.  This resulted in many years of 5 to 15% "temporary" wage reductions, zero bonuses, and no pay increases, as well as wave after wave of staged layoffs.  Enabling resources such as administrative services and travel were obliterated.  The debilitating reductions in both technical personnel and the enabling resources were independent of the expectations for the organizations to operate at equal or higher levels of productivity.  Thus, those who were "Lucky" enough to keep their jobs did so at reduced salaries, no pay raises or career advancement, and no sympathy from executive management.  The corporation was entirely beholden to Wall Street and cash flow expectations and it was a miserable place to work.  The HP corporate culture was extinct, employee commitment to the company was abused until it was extinguished, and one of the greatest examples of corporate success, technical innovation, and workplace culture completely disintegrated.

Agilent Technologies is now Keysight Technologies.  No legacy of the great Titan Hewlett Packard remains in the spirit or culture of the company.  There is no ghost in the machine.  They continue to operate under financially Spartan conditions relying on very long uncompensated work hours for salaried exempt employees.  They continue to develop and market outstanding instruments but no longer enjoy an uncontested dominance of the market as they have lost market share to aggressive, high performance competitors such as Rohde & Schwarz. They are often playing catch-up in terms of new product introductions, high performance leadership, and price-performance optimized offerings, but there is absolutely no question that they remain a fiercely competitive, highly competent Titan of the test and measurement world and will remain so at least into the distant future.  Their overall competitive capability has been hampered by their failure to secure market dominance in the cellular handset test market, which went to Rohde & Schwarz during the LTE technology and manufacturing cycle.  It is only a guess that this amounted to at least a billion dollars in revenue, if not far more, over the last 10 years.

Agilent parades itself as many things. It spends an amazing amount of time trying to sell itself as a viable place to work, in truth it is just the opposite. There exists in Agilent an amazing amount of racial tension. Verbal fights would even often take place on the work floor. Agilent while preaching equality does not at all support it. Management is mostly selected for their ability to follow rather than lead. Being one of the most productive workers at my site, I was continually turned down for promotions and raises which they will do anything not to give or recognize. Their benefit packages and salaries are significantly less than competitors. Agilent as a company is more worried about appearances than actual substance while keeping the revolving doors of employment turning. During my five long years working for this ungrateful company, I have seen the disgust grow in workers who served for decades and recently hired alike and after the last year in 2021 one third of our workforce at our location new and old quit seeking jobs at competitors or retiring before they planned to. Because of shoddy management, we actually started producing less materials having us to work 6 days weeks almost every week during my last year. This has to do with more of the people at Agilent who I worked with actually becoming angry or depressed and doing less because of this poor style of management. Upper management is completely clueless, proving themselves to be oblivious to how to actually treat their workers but keep them as well. Not a single person I ever met in my life wants to be singled out because of race or beliefs and still feel safe to work at their job. Instead of bringing people together they demonize groups to cause fracturing within their workforce. They make gobs of money which they do not use to actually produce an efficient working atmosphere. People will actually produce items to be sold using the wrong materials (which will negatively impact which the customer uses the product for) and the products will still pass quality tests to be shipped out as fast as possible. There software for example is hopefully outdated and does not actually run consistently by any means throughout the day. Workstations will actually produce injuries over time.  Many of my coworkers have complained about this and is hidden by management. They will flush you out for new blood. If you decide to take a job here, make sure you are still looking for something better. Know better than to believe the hype they try to saturate you with.

With Agilent, my entire stretch of employment was at the corporate level.  I managed several commodities in support of facilities around the world.

My days consisted of supplier selection, supplier qualification, supplier development, product sourcing, contract negotiation, contract and supply chain management, third party logistics and problem solving with constant team building integrated into the process.

With respect to management as mentioned earlier, Agilent Technologies, was a well managed company having spun off from Hewlett-Packard.

My personal management involved leading the team,  which consisted of Engineers and Procurement Specialist form the various division supported by the commodity I was managing at the time. My management responsibility also consisted of presenting the teams performance metrics to the Group Managers, Corporate Manufacturing and Procurement Managers on a quarterly bases.

As part of this process I held the responsibility of facilitating the development of team objectives, the team mission statement, which the objectives were designed to support.  I also held the responsibility for developing team based performance and compensation reviews.

The most challenging would be the travel.  There was pretty close to 60% travel.

What I enjoyed most was ensuring my team was empowered to do their jobs, meeting our team developed objectives, being appreciated and saving lots of money the team objective was 8 - 10% per year.  we never missed it.

I was hired as part of a team of 7 people who's soul purpose was to become an east coast branch of a team in California who had unionized. So basically, union busting, but we didn't know anything about that in the beginning. 

We had a trainer fly out from CA, who in retrospect probably knew what the company was up to and BARELY showed us the basics of the position. Showed up late and left early. 
Just some Powerpoint presentations and a few mock scenarios that they didn't even let us do. Just watch over their shoulder. This could have been done remotely...

After 5 days of sabotaged training, we were left to cobble the rest together in real time as we went live. The team-work of the group was actually quite inspiring, and some very good progress was made, until they chose to terminate the team in CA. 

Foolishly, they were given a weeks notice. Plenty of time to delete templates from the shared folder and submit poor work that had to be revised by our team who had been active for maybe 11 days. The manager who started with us quit. He updated his resume and wrote us all letters of recommendation before he did. We were terrified and frantically started looking for new jobs, and left one by one.

Shortly after the east coast branch was dissolved and the responsibilities divided among other branch locations. So this company hired 7 people to fire 5 people, and then just phased those 7 people out.

I thoroughly regret ever working for this company. They chewed us up and spat us out.

The company feels like it's in a constant state of chaos, scrambling to redefine itself through endless structural changes that ultimately lead to nothing but more confusion and inefficiency. These reorganizations often serve as power plays rather than true improvements, leaving employees feeling disoriented and undervalued.

The well-being initiatives advertised by leadership seem like empty promises. While there’s a strong focus on optics—employee engagement surveys, wellness programs, and flashy presentations—the reality on the ground is starkly different. Employees who go above and beyond are often pushed to their limits with little recognition, while those who underperform or complain are given undue support. This creates an unfair and demoralizing environment for the team.

The culture has become a breeding ground for toxic, self-serving leadership. Leaders who thrive here are those more focused on maintaining their influence and control than empowering their teams or driving meaningful results. Real solutions to the company’s challenges are overshadowed by the relentless pursuit of appearances over substance.

Instead of fostering a collaborative and innovative environment, the focus remains on creating a polished façade while ignoring the issues that matter most to employees. The disconnect between the company’s values and its actions is deeply discouraging, leaving many questioning the direction and integrity of leadership.

I followed my manager from Oak Technology to Agilent. This was a big change. Agilent was much larger as an HP spin off. I provided routine administrative support to the President of the Semiconductor Products Group as follows:

•	Manage MS Outlook calendar.  Schedule meetings, conference calls and gather/prepare materials as needed.  Act as the liaison with internal and external contacts on all matters relating to scheduling and logistics. 
•	Research and confirm all domestic and international travel arrangements.  Research and book conference rooms for meetings at outside hotels or airline clubs, as necessary. 
•	Prepare and modify correspondence, such as scheduling requests, client contracts, report templates, etc.  Perform internet research as needed and provide summary to consultants. 
•	Manage incoming emails & calls, deliver/communicate accurate messages and action items. Ask probing questions in order to respond effectively and efficiently. 
•	Manage and prepare all expense reports/invoices and receipts.  Perform account reconciliation to ensure that all expenses are appropriately allocated. 
•	Assist with large project coordination as needed.  Coordinate with internal and external team members to schedule meetings, ensure calendar/timeline aligns with project plan, participate in team calls, assist with data compilation, etc. 
•	Complete special projects as requested.

As the outbound marketing manager in a complex fiber optics test & measurement division, I had to constantly seek approval for details from not only my direct boss but marketing personnel in NAMO - Agilent's North American Marketing Organization AND marketing personnel in the German office.  The German group was highly technical and responsible for product development.  The US group was the sales arm for the German division.  Relationships were not often good.  I was in a pivotal position, trying to augment US sales peoples' interface with clients in the US.  With NAMO help, we put a costly 16 wheel truck on the road in the US and it transported all the division's major products - for product demonstration across the country.  The building of the mobile unit was a laborious task, as was the coordination with sales managers in regions of the US to use the mobile unit for product demonstration.  The dot com bubble fueled the early success of the division, but management did NOT read the decline of the dot com frenzy.  Eventually the division was closed.  Very poor long-term projection skills and too much technical in-fighting within German/US division.  Not an easy place to work and be successful.

To start things off, I must admit I was a subcontractor working at Agilent Technologies.  However, the culture was for the most part the best of any company I've been at thus far in my career.  Each quarter there would be some sort of pot luck or social gathering to maintain morale.  The few times I asked for time off I was never hassled, and a handful of times we were even let out early on the Friday before a holiday.  Hard work is certainly appreciated, and I was promoted several times and recognized when major deadlines were met.

Unfortunately however, I worked at a smaller site, an acquisition.  That in itself is an uphill battle from what I gathered, and eventually upper management decided to downsize our division and outsource our products to other divisions.  If they stood to saves several millions of dollars in doing so, I would understand.  However, after crunching the numbers for how much it would cost to produce our products in another factory, the savings were nearly negligible and would take several years to be realized if at all.  In short, great place to work but as is common in many companies, upper management does not always execute orders resulting for the better.

A great place to work, except for when the management doesn't have a clue what to do. I was in the Bio-Science division. We were developing gene chips for all sorts of purposes. The management didn't have a clue. They were all gun ho on the hardware and software we were developing. A gene chip scanner was the furthest along. The management supported its development really well. I was in a group that was trying to automate the process of using the chips. That is take a new gene chip, inject a sample of DNA. Let the machine process the sample. After the process, the gene chip is inserted into a carousel (like a slide projector) that is removed from the machine and placed into the gene chip scanner above. They dumped the project because they could not get a software person to fix some lines of code. This was in the late 90's when software was hot, but we hired a guy and then he was taken away from us. The marketing guy had no interest in the project he barely spoke two words to us. They were shocked when three of us left the group. The lead engineer left for the Agilent lab and me and another guy left the company. Like I said, great company, but try to find out if the division knows what it wants to do.

Goods: 
Salary is best in industry for role.
Annual profit sharing bonus.
Great work life balance. 
Some amazing scientists are there with whom you may get opportunity to work. 
You will get all resources to learn things needed ONLY for your job role. 

Bads: 
Growth opportunity is very limited or almost none.
Growth/learning is only provided/encouraged for the job you are doing. 
Management is very poor in decision making and do not consult with R&D team members to close a project. 
You will work with some very horrible scientists who don’t understand even science as they have spent their whole life in same company in same role. 
Project team members changes with projects and can be located throughout various geographical locations. This severely increases the communication gap. Sometime you have to wait 2 weeks for a response from other collaborating team member to proceed with your followup troubleshooting experiments. 


Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Research associate 8 salaries reported	$97,892 per year
Manufacturer's representative 11 salaries reported	$41.37 per hour
Manufacturing associate 15 salaries reported	$37.73 per hour
Manufacturing engineer 14 salaries reported	$114,814 per year
Assembler 16 salaries reported	$27.45 per hour

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