Sandisk QA - QA Engineer WD Employee Review

1.0
8 May 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

This is regarding Sandisk which got acquired by WD. The sandisk campus has nicely renovated buildings and facilities such as the onsite gym but that's about it. The product I was working on did not have any overlap with Western Digital so there wasn't really a risk of being laid off in my group.

Cons

Ask if your team has a lot of h1b's and contractors. If so, don't join if you have other job options because you might be joining my former sandisk QA group which was terrible. It was not worth the salary to stay there. Your career will stagnate for low pay and ill treatment and no recognition. I was given an increasing workload and responsibilities over a couple years but no raise. Whether before or after the acquisition my department has been consistently bad. On the surface the buildings are sleek and modern. However after a while it feels very cold and soulless like an asylum. Firstly 1) The working environment in my org was garbage. Everyone in my org was overworked. Meetings were often contentious where managers or coworkers openly chastise others. It seemed like this behavior was not discouraged but in fact tolerated. The only people to get raises or promotions were brusk dictator-like A-type jerks, or poor workaholics who spent every waking hour working their lives away. Secondly 2) the Pay was terrible because raises/promotions are so infrequent. So you will get saddled with more responsibilities but no raise to match it for years. Also, my team was almost all H1B's or contractors which gives management no reason to give decent compensation. How can you ask for a raise when you are surrounded by h1b's and contractors who are making peanuts? So the overall message was that the workers were expendable cheap labor. If you didn't like it, too bad, you could be replaced easily with an H1B or contractor. Thirdly 3) the deadlines are inflexible and unrealistic. Even if I had a valid reason for a delay, the upper management would act angry without first hearing the whole story, or ask rapid fire questions and keep interrupting me without much interest in my inputs or concerns. Not a good environment at all. Fourth-ly 4) Management micromanages like crazy and are obsessed with reports. You will spend as much time on JIRA or reporting as time spend on actual engineering work. There's a cumbersome JIRA system where you have to log how many hours per week you work on each thing and mark the progress of tens of JIRA items every week. And they have project managers hounding you to adhere to that every week. Not to mention weekly and monthly status reports that I don't think my direct manager even bothered to read even though I had to send it out. Don't work for sandisk QA if you have other options.

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