Lam Research reviews

Work/life balance at Lam is non-existent. Expected to work long hours and weekends with no appreciation or recognition since it's the norm at the company. You have to handle multiple projects at once so there's little time to learn about anything in depth, you only have time to execute experiments and organize data on slides. Boring, repetitive work. - cleaving, preparing wafers/samples, sitting around waiting for experiment to be complete, preparing samples for analysis. Some days you can end up spending more than 6 hours (or more) in the lab - very hard on your legs and back. Toxic work environment and culture. Everyone is stressed out all the time, so the smallest thing upset other employees. There are long queues to use equipment, so when it's Friday afternoon and the machine is booked until 2am people tend to get upset. They have little patience for a poor presentation , but you barely have time to make ANY presentation since you're always in the lab or doing measurements somewhere. Highly competitive and very stressful. You work fast without any breaks so you tend to make mistakes, and the managers remember all of it. It can be very political and usually the VP/director favorites are the ones to get the good bonus/RSU's; everyone else get peanuts.

Lam has a motto "A place where successful people want to work." That is only true for upper management. I overheard a senior director tell a PhD engineer that Lam does not want smart people just people willing to take orders and work hard. The work-life balance is poor: Multi-tasking means that weekends and nights are perfectly acceptable additions to a 60 hour week. Upper management fails to review managers from the perspective of the managed, rather many directors are promoted on their self-aggrandizing eloquence rather than actual performance and competence. One senior vice president tells his minions to "over communicate" - this edict results in endless meetings filled with constant and irrelevant questions and interruptions. Excessive meetings bite into lab time. And lab time is hectic. The labs are crowded with equipment. Equipment is resourced tightly, such that missing one's slot on a tightly scheduled tool, by just a few minutes, meant a full days delay, followed by yelling from management. Lam is a high-tech high-complexity business; things will go wrong. Yet, too often panic ensues when something goes wrong. Meetings go on for hours with Chicken Little scenarios. The future of the semiconductor industry is expected to be uncertain since Moore's law is reaching an end. Will Lam be prepared for a major paradigm shift? The company has not introduced a "new" etch technology since the late 1990's. They have focuses, with reasonable justification, on improving and perfecting the technologies that were introduced about 20 years ago.