firmware engineer

staff engineer

principal software engineer

technologist

software engineer

Western Digital

If you dream of becoming a fire fighter but could not cut it, WD is the place to be! Be prepared to battle fires daily in a high pressure situations. One little spark can spread like wildfire within a matter of minutes.

Everything revolves around upper management's opinion. Employees usually make the best recommendations based on information and are constantly ignored. That's business.The cruel twist is later when there the blame is not placed on upper management,but on the individual employee no matter what documentation is presented. Typical day is composed of chaos: responsible for numerous projects worldwide so days can be extremely long.

Unlike most companies when assigned a project, employee is responsible for the entire project, not a portion of it. Constantly being pushed by tyrant management to meet unrealistic deadlines. Too many goals for employees to meet compared to the amount of staff along with the number of other obligations (projects and meetings). Start a project = already behind.

Teamwork has two different meanings. First meaning: you are the team. Second meaning: work all hours until work is complete. Business more concerned about "checking the box" instead of doing it's homework.

Majority of co-workers are generally nice because most understand the pressure being forced upon by management. Work environment is like high school. A lot of cliques, gossiping, and some questionable behavior. Majority of people want to be managers and delegate work to other employees or other sources.

Most difficult part of the job is trying to complete assignments due to work environment (flip flopping of decisions on a hourly basis with project timelines being shortened) and other constraints. The best part of the job is going home for the day.

If you need further confirmation, please read the review titled Slaveship.

From day 1 my manager was angry at me. He seemed like he was trying to intimidate me when I was just there to write code. I saw his boss pull him twice into an office when he got angry at other people. Once was at the IT guys and I don't know who he was angry at the other time. I never had the experience working anywhere where I would make sure I had a defensible position while trying not to look like I was doing that. I made a point not to leave an unattended cup of coffee or anything in my cube in case he dropped anything in it.

If I told him anything twice he would get angry. This resulted in a large waste of time because I had told him this clonezilla server installation I was setting up would actually fit on a USB flash drive and that would be a very convenient solution. When I told him that he didn't seem to acknowledge it but I couldn't tell him again since I learned not to ever tell him anything twice. About two weeks later we ended up doing the USB flash drive installation which I had ready two weeks earlier.

I left my cube empty since I noticed he was always looking for anything to criticize. I was amazed his boss didn't dismiss him. I liked everybody at Western Digital except being around my manager made me very tense and I considered him a work place hazard. There were a-lot of Russians at WD and I found their sense of humor entertaining. I would try to imitate it when they weren't around but don't tell them that.

My technical duties were interesting and not too challenging and the project had tasks related to developing an SSD drive. The project promised to give me a-lot of SSD flash experience which I thought would be very useful since that technology is very convenient and is replacing magnetic hard drive storage.

 There wasn't a sense of team work at the area of wafer production. The employees weren't treated equally when it came to task assignments. Some were given more workload to be completed in comparison to others in the same department. The flexibility of breaks was at random, some were able to take them at a routine matter while others were kept at their stations until the task was accomplished on time and didn't have support to pass down the job. There wasn't fair treatment of how the jobs were rotated, some employees had the chance to run production on the same two machines for months and the other chosen employees had to run four to five machines at the same time, on a daily basis for the same duration period.
 For the pay rate to be a wafer operator and be treated in this manner, it wasn't worth staying as a committed employee for Western Digital. Disappointing to say but there is favoritism in the judgemental calls of recently new or old employees; one will never be given room to grow in an environment like this. I wouldn't recommend newcomers there since it wasn't an inviting work place having to do 12 hour shifts plus the overtime that was mandated after a long tough week as is. 
 I respect the product and the history of the Western Digital company. Glad I was able to see first hand the steps of how a wafer is carefully processed. Overall, the effort of long time employees that have given to the success of it. It just needs better leaders and change of perspective when it comes to guiding the workforce. Also, they may need to update most of the machines since they continuously tend to break down for no apparent reason. The old technology can't seem to keep up with the modern product.

WD is generally a good company, it is a leader in its space in the computer storage segment, follows best practices in management, design, development and manufacturing of products and most importantly seems to always make money! One great thing about the company is how transparent it is.

Off late with a slew of acquisitions and with the resulting restructuring, layoffs have been too frequent. People working in core teams and who are competent at what they do have been less affected. There are certainly exceptions to this and that is a gamble that a company that needs to preserve its financial statements takes. So there can be a lot of demoralized people depending on the team you join. On the other hand, if you join the right team, you have a great opportunity to grow with the company. The demand for storage is always high, so from that standpoint, it is a great industry to be in.

Storage is an interesting area of work without a doubt. Moving disks and moving parts made traditional storage technically fascinating. SSDs have their own sets of challenges with regards to reliability and performance which need to be solved with innovation and development.

Notice that I said WD is a good company. It is not great because what generally happens is once you get into an area of work, there is not much opportunity to go up in the organization beyond a certain designation. Too many old timers from the HDD times with tremendous but irrelevant (anymore) knowledge need to retire. However, if you want a steady income with a steady job especially in Southern California, you need look no further.

While the reverse commute kept me hanging on longer than I wanted, the reality is that the leadership team has bitten off way more than it can chew: WD acquired Hgst, and Sandisk, and are trying to homogenize the three subs into one company.  This means they went from a 40,000 employee company, to a +/-80,000 person company.  There is a lot of planning and perseverance that need to happen in such an enormous integration.  Systems, teams, product lines and cultures need to meld.  Exec's are making decisions without fully understanding the final impact, because they don't have insight to the lower levels.  Leaders aren't selecting comprehensive tiger teams to plan facilitation of these enormous tasks, and at the end of the day, they're not willing to back off from bad decisions or poor or faulty execution.  That results in tremendous hardship for the lower level people who are just trying to do their jobs. And as people leave (voluntarily, or through many layoffs that are inevitable after acquisitions) there's no urgency to replace or reassign critical roles.  Communication is nearly non-existent.

Any company of this size that misses a pay cycle to all legacy Hgst employees is simply not planning well!  Leaders should be embarrassed.  Exec's need to reach deeper into the employee population to plan and make facilitation and implementation decisions, as they clearly don't understand down the road impacts.  There will be many more employees who give up along the way, and they're likely to be good ones.  My guess is that by 2018 the worst issues will be resolved.  Good luck!

I worked for WDC for more than 15 years, and while I hated the style of management and the ugly politics people played to get ahead, I stuck around for the friendship of the people.  Management here is the pits and all of them get there playing dirty politics and backbiting.  These people thrive on tooting their own horn with little achievement, but management loves them because they see a bit of themselves in these people.  For example, one VP of firmware was promoted to the post, despite him being one of the causes of company spending billions on a failed enterprise product launch, due to his strong political connection with senior management.  The shame was that the guy who grew the company’s profit by delivering highly profitable data center drives was shoved aside to promote the other guy.  Senior management even gave the politician credit for products everyone knew he had nothing to do with!

If you want to learn you can, but only if you are not already experienced.  If you are experienced then the people on board will insure that you don’t succeed.  You will, perhaps, do the project you were hired for.  But, after that, unless you know how to elbow your way through the backbiting, you will never be able do any job that you really thrive in; some people spend their careers here to make sure you don’t.

When working at  western digital I learned about the mobile hard drives that we use every day to help with the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, from the phones to computers. Western Digital makes these wafers that are the same size as a cd music disk but they're a little heavier due to the wiring and gold embedded inside. We would archive the data that was written on the boxes the wafers came in, inside a computer then send them off for another process. Hardest part of the job was the clean suit you would have to get used to while working the long hours. We worked 12 hours each day and 4 hours overtime. The most enjoyable part was getting paid a big check after working only four days and the positive and productive environment. The people there were great the management was strict due to the "Clean room" environment employees worked in, but that was to be expected overall pretty cool place.

What is the best part of working at the company?
The organization as a whole is very organized with their communication between departments, their IT department is very much on top of everything. 

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
The most stressful part of WD was the constant updating status and responding to questions on the teams network and dropping what you were doing to respond to another tool down and maybe returning to what you had been working or being sent off to another down.  Meanwhile responding to all the questions and updating . The maintenance group is drastically under staffed for the response and action WD requires of its people. 

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
It's all about where you are and what are doing and when will you be done. ETA is very over used in their communication with their employees.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Running from one fire to the next none stop. Even at lunch and brakes you will be asked questions by manufacturing, Management and engineering.

People generally stay at WD because of their peers. People are generally very friendly, and encourage extra-curricular activities.
People generally leave WD because they have difficult management, as well as lack of competitive pay. Management at the high level is continually changing, so there is little to no continuity. Direct management is definitely hit or miss. Sometimes a really big miss. So if you interview here, be sure to ask the employees how they like their group as a whole, and how they like working for their boss. Managers can make a great job into a nightmare, but they can also turn a mundane job into a pleasant experience. Both types are at WD, so just be careful.
Also, be aware that every 6 months or fewer, there are mass layoffs. Lately, they've been HUGE due to merging companies. That has turned the mood pretty sour in most groups.

All hi-tech companies are fast paced, with the normal challenges associated. The difference is how the management handles these challenges. Most significantly, whether or not a team-oriented atmosphere is fostered. WD as a whole is a well run company. WD Media, the division in which I worked, did not foster a culture conducive to teamwork.

The people I worked with are great: hard-working, enthusiastic, intelligent, and very dedicated. Even under unreasonable timelines, they strived to achieve the goals placed before them. Unfortunately, their efforts often went unappreciated, with only the demand for more work from the management team for reward.

The best part of my job was working with the other teams in tackling the technical challenges associated with our product. Problem solving, analytical experiments, product improvement, those comprise the most interesting and rewarding part of my job at WD.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Firmware engineer 3 salaries reported	$128,000 per year
Staff engineer 10 salaries reported	$131,454 per year
Principal software engineer 3 salaries reported	$160,133 per year
Technologist 4 salaries reported	$187,618 per year
Software engineer 1 salary reported	$55.00 per hour

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