If you're thinking of working at Cymer....think again!
Pros
Many of the employees of Cymer are incredibly intelligent and very dedicated. Cymer pays well (both salary and bonuses).....because they have to. The technology is very complex and interesting. It's very much an engineering oriented company. Despite how upper management views and treats its employees - the company continues to do well financially. This is mostly due to having only one competitor. The GM of TCZ has integrity, is a great leader, and treats employees with respect.
Cons
COO has a huge ego and is a micromanager to the extreme. No matter what you do or accomplish it is never good enough. CEO still has the founder mentality and believes that people should eat, sleep, breathe Cymer at all times. This is understandable when you are a start-up company and the risk/rewards are high, but Cymer is not a start-up company. Employees are asked to travel internationally with only a day or two notice, over holidays, on weekends, etc - but are not given any comp time. The expectation is that you work, work, work period. Executive management has no respect for the employee's work/life balance, yet executive management is nowhere to be found at 5PM. The mantra is anticipate, plan and flawlessly execute which is laughable as the executive team does not follow this at all. It's a constant reactionary environment which is mostly driven by the COO's whims. If you are going into the company as a indivindual contributor you may be okay, but if you are considering any kind of management position - RUN THE OTHER WAY! You will have no authority to get anything done and you will have no budget. You may get a plan signed off on and will be in the process of execution when your VP tells you that the COO is claiming he has not heard of this project and as a result won't support it (even though he has indeed been previously briefed on the project, but just doesn't remember). And no matter what you and your team accomplishes it will never be good enough. Almost the entire executive team is from Applied Materials. Good luck trying to implement anything that isn't the "Applied" way. At last count there were over 60 executives at the Director level and above had left the organization within a 4 year period. Executive management is big on hiring VP's but not giving management headcount for individual contributors. HR is ineffective - not because they don't want to help or try to help but because the COO keeps tieing their hands and then blaming them for everything. Cymer's 2 customers completely rule them - there is not customer management, requirements gathering, in many cases no good product roadmap in place, no documentation, etc... Although Cymer claims they are a technology driven company - this only impacts their product. Their products are very complex and technical. Operations is an absolute mess. Expect an outdated version of Lotus Notes for email, manual time cards for non exempt employees, a home grown system for performance management, the www.cymer.com site is from the dark ages, the intranet (Cymersource) is a joke. And good luck trying to get the COO to approve updating operational systems. The communication to employees (or lack thereof) is a joke. There is an irrational fear of information getting to the customers. As a result, information is rarely shared with the field organization. Many times field employees hear about decisions that were made by Cymer management from the customers.
