-Another way to look at the previous point is that no young or ambitious people want to work here (also note that the gender ratio is 4M:1F)
-People seem accepting of low-quality work
-Parking's a daily struggle, the cafeteria food is mediocre, the culture is blah, and they don't even provide Wi-Fi
-I met several people who routinely got stuck working 60-hour weeks (including weekends)
-The company seems to be on shaky financial ground, leading to 4-5 mandatory weekly shutdowns every year
-Applied seems set on employing just enough people to get by (complaints about understaffing are rampant), and paying them well below market. They're also happy to exploit gross inequities -- how else to explain two workers with identical titles & start dates being $30,000 apart on salary?
But I'm mostly leaving this review to warn about working here as a technical writer (especially in the "Front End Products" group), which comes with a list of cons all its own. Contrary to everything they say in both the job description and interview, what they offer is not "technical writing" by any stretch of the imagination. All documents at Applied are essentially pre-written, since they all follow a rigid boilerplate format that can't be modified, even though absolutely everyone (both inside and outside the company) agrees that they read like crap. I'm guessing they feel the need to inflate titles and mislead people because if they were honest about the actual nature of the job, no one would take it.
For the first few months, I spent most of my days doing one thing: copying & pasting every word of text from one document into another, one paragraph at a time (necessary because things don't transfer smoothly into Microsoft Word). This involved pausing after every paragraph to clean up line breaks & special characters, reformat numbered lists, manually re-type entire data charts, etc. -- all brainless, tedious drudgery that any child could do (and would be bored by). It's no wonder my coworker quit within the first month.
I hung around in the hopes that it would turn into a real job, but things actually got worse. At some point, my daily duties abruptly switched to taking documents and trying to identify all the engineering specifications that were wrong or missing (as if I had any ability to tell). This basically came down to going around the office to harass various engineers with questions like "can you tell me what numbers go in this data table??" Thus I'd gone from being a janitor to being a secretary. More specifically, a secretary in a foreign language (the technical & in-house jargon can be indecipherable), talking to people who often try to avoid talking to you, skip meetings, and speak very limited English.
Not helping the situation was getting stuck with a dishonest, disrespectul manager who's prone to hotheaded outbursts and insulting people in public meetings. He's also prone to leading employees on to believe their job is secure, then disposing of them with a same-day layoff.
At one point, he actually admitted that the job has nothing to do with technical writing... yet a few days later, I saw a fresh listing on LinkedIn with the same title & description as before, ready to hook the next unsuspecting sucker. Which confirmed my suspicion that the deception was intentional.
Applied Materials is a big place, so your mileage may vary. But for what it's worth, this is the most negative and disappointing job experience I've had in many years.
