There are obviously good aspects of Micron, but the negative far exceeds the positive. When I joined Micron, the 1st 6 months were your typical “honeymoon” period where upper management treated people with some respect. At the same time, living in Boise for the first time, all I heard from people throughout the city and local county is that Micron is not a favorable place to work. After about 10 months or so, is where I finally started to see where the negativity was coming from. I want to highlight 7 key items that many who work or have worked at Micron can relate to:
1. Since Micron is based in Boise there are no other tech companies around. Due to this fact, upper management knows that they have the upper hand on people that want to stay in the area. They can demote, embarrass, or move you to another department, and the employee will have no choice but to accept. This does not happen in the Bay area because you have so many other opportunities and good people can go anywhere they like.
2. Micron hires experienced engineers from other companies’ primary that have NVM (NAND) experience. They essentially just drain the knowledge out of them and then treat them as stated above and then just go through the same cycle over and over again. This is well documented in many articles where people have stated that Micron hires their competitors and use all their knowledge. However, their technical leadership team that has been there for more than 15 years takes all the credit for all the outsiders tech innovation. Recently, Micron has experienced a large attrition compared to most tech companies. Some departments lost over 50% of their employees because of poor working conditions such as forcing engineers to work onsite 100% of the time AND travel to Asia during COVID in 2020 and 2021.
3. Upper leadership only cares about the employee survey. Some of the management requests that you have a pre-meeting(s) with your employee so you can understand the questions of the survey and make sure to have a positive outlook on the company. The last time I checked, a survey should be taken by the employee without any outside bias influence. When the survey results are low, they start pointing fault to the working class engineers. They say the survey is anonymous, but we all know that is not true. Asia/Singapore surveys for Micron do very well because they are forced to check the positive boxes or else there will be consequences. Micron claims diversity and inclusion but that is not evident at all.
4. If you want to succeed in Micron’s Technology Department, you have to be in 2 categories. 1.You need to kiss up and be in the right group, & 2. In engineering meetings, you better just start asking questions, or as management states, “you must make noise”, because if you don’t, then you don’t understand the technology”. Many people that work at Micron can relate to this type of the person in a meeting that always says: “Oh wait, can you go back 2 slides……uh, uh, that slide makes no sense, uh, yeah, I don't understand'….this probably happens in EVERY meeting. A great CEO once told me that the ones that speak the least most of the time are the ones that do the actual work. At Micron, just speak the loudest and ask the most irrelevant questions in a meeting so that others think you are engaged but really have no idea what you are talking about, and you will do just fine.
5. I had a manager that came to Micron that worked at a couple of other tech companies and he was probably the most knowledgeable in his field. Yet, management treated him and our team so poorly that most of us left. He brought a sense of humor, cared for everyone in the group, and mentored all of us. At the end, our module(s) surpassed the previous 2 tech nodes, but we were not part of the click group. Remember, employees have no other place to go in Boise, right?
6. The good thing about COVID is that it brought an option of remote work including opening the doors for experienced engineers to work in a variety of other fields and companies throughout different states. In addition, it exposed Micron on their overall compensation for employees. People on reviews claim that Micron compensates well, but most of these employees have only worked for Micron. Micron’s competitors pay far more “overall” compensation.
7. Finally, I have to say that Micron’s sense of management reporting is by far the worst in the semiconductor industry. Many Boise technology employees report to Asia/Singapore management and are reviewed by their management. Micron also moves some of their most inexperienced engineers in into the most difficult technology orgs and puts them in charge. I guess that is not a problem, because the real people doing the work will be other that were brought over from the competitor companies. Remember, if you worked at Micron for over 15 years and are in the click group, you will be taken care of. That means others that were hired from other companies or even new college graduates will get the low rating at the end of the year.
The statement “employees don’t leave companies, they leave toxic cultures” is not entirely true, but over the last several years at Micron that has been the case. I would suggest that you look to see who is in charge and for how long at Micron. The elitist take care of themselves and keep themselves in power and that is a large part of Micron. Ask how attrition has been…if they state, “normal, just like the industry” that is a bold face lie. There are so many other companies out there, and I would highly suggest that Micron be at the bottom of the semiconductor list. If upper management does not get weeded out soon at Micron the same cycle will continue and Micron will truly take the top of the “toxic culture” work title.
Poor leadership
Innovation primarily comes from copying competitors and hiring their employees
Average to low compensation
False employee surveys
