Pros
You get to work on the most high-tech equipment and technology in the world. There is no other product out there that nearly competes with KT. When working on developing new products, you can use "new" s/w technologies and implement them into the system. Product development teams are diverse and well structured. Very team oriented. Low attrition rates by upper level senior engineers, not much turnover by them at least. Lots of Phd's work here. Top notch R&D. Impressive cleanroom facilities. Walking distance to Ranch99 Milpitas so you get your lunch from any chinese restaurant of your choice. Has tennis, basketball, and volleyball on-site leagues. Running trails on nearby levy. Excellent training programs, and ability to get reimbursed tuition.
Cons
Due to the highly complex nature of our product, you might be a specialist in your domain and only work on one aspect of the system, and there is not much growth or career advancement out of that spot. Sure you might want to explore other areas of the complex system, but it becomes political, if you start taking work from another group's manager. Once a product has been passed down from engineering to manufacturing, software configuration management and tracking is crucial. Instead of doing development work, you might be debugging code, and trying to negotiate for machine time, i.e. if you get high priority from management. Probably 40% was developing product, and the other 60% is process control and ensuring mfg is supported. Sure, you get yearly performance reviews, but even with you have to be a 80-90% percentile in ranking class you rarely get promotion or raises. Instead as an incentive they give you RSU stock. Yeah who cares about that, it has a 4 year maturity. Compensation when compared to others is 10-20% below market. Over past years, there has not been any pay-raises, but I guess that is aligned with this semi-con industry. Lots of old-timers here in the engineering dept (with 10,15,20 yrs or more seniority). Suppose that is a downside of working here, since there is lack of innovation from younger recruits. Compared K-T to Google or Ebay, etc. where there is a lot of innovation and motivation. Here you are likely to see a lot of old-timers in mid/late-30-40s. There seems to be too many top-heavy engineers, but very little or low numbers of entry to mid-level engineers.
