Pros
A pretty nice campus with some cute dogs and a cafe with free coffee and tea. Cafeteria has pretty good variety too. Parking is plentiful and it's in a safe and quiet neighborhood next to a golf course. People seem to get paid pretty well in general at Samsung in comparison to a lot of other competing Bay Area tech companies.
Cons
1. Incredibly bureaucratic, hierarchical structure makes things difficult: Now this is going to be the complaint of most everyone at large international corporations. I'm totally aware of that and am also aware of what other large corporations are like internally. The bureaucracy is on another level at Samsung. Every decision you make in management at some point in the chain goes back to Korea. Everything you do on your work computer is monitored by someone in Korea. You must fill out intense and tedious paperwork to gain approval to do almost anything and take extensive classes to learn how to assess your employees, your coworkers, your managers in the terms asked by HQ (every employee learns this pretty quickly it's not just a manager thing lol.) A lot of the issues in management and hierarchy are cultural to Samsung's business in Korea. Although management in the US across departments are constantly attempting to change their work environments, they cannot change where the budget comes from. Every decision made about every product / project comes down to the opinion of an executive. It's pretty exhausting. I'm sure it's probably exhausting for some of the executives too. 2. Sunday is Monday in Korea: Work life balance is fine for the people that have it fine. For those who don't...it's not. This is something once again you'll find most anywhere but one thing is for sure -- Sunday in the US is Monday in Korea. 3. Not really a forward thinking company: Overall Samsung is not really a forward thinking company. They have some great products and the semiconductor business is going well for those involved in that (they have a beautiful campus in San Jose.) But overall Samsung is often fighting against itself. Concepts are thrown away immediately if they do not make profit, teams are downsized at the will of executives to make room for new projects that get shut down when they don't immediately perform at the capacity executives would like. There is not "lets build something for 5 years out". It's mostly a business based on "How do we make sales in the next two years?" All Silicon Valley companies are aiming towards the future in some sense but a good way to gauge how forward thinking a company may be is the number of employees. Companies who hire large staff for research and concept building tend to keep more in the vault. That being said there is an incredibly large number of Samsung employees in Korea and many groundbreaking innovations in HQ. The same just simply can't be said for most of its American subsidiaries. Even if the money is worth the stress temporarily it seems like there's a pretty high turnaround. Not sure where your limits are but seems like most are about 2 years. I'm not actually sure if that's good or bad, that's just how it is.
