[bob1029]

I used to work at SAS and can corroborate the "top down" nature of the organization.

"We just need to copy Korea" is not a good narrative if you want to keep high-quality American engineers interested in a long term career path with you.

I lasted barely 3 years before the lack of volition got to me. Went to contract for a video game developer afterwards (huge pay cut) just to clear my mind and reconnect with reality.

[CamperBob2]

Went to contract for a video game developer to clear my mind and reconnect with reality.

Damn, that's really saying something about your former employer.

[pm90]

If you wrote about your experience, I (at least) would certainly read it.

[bob1029]

Honestly, the overall experience wasn't that bad. I did get a lot out of those 3 years.

To put things into perspective, not many people ever get to set foot inside of a leading-edge fab. I've been inside multiple, both in America & Korea. I've been able to sit in meetings with engineers across the entire spectrum and participate in multi-national system upgrade efforts.

The best way to describe the whole experience is like working inside a starship. Genuinely, it feels incredible to walk into that room and see billions of dollars of the most sophisticated hardware on earth all working together in relentless harmony. Simply sitting in the engineering offices and seeing the real-time logs scrolling gives you a sense for the monstrosity just a few firewalls over. The techniques & hardware are exotic by default everywhere. It almost never gets old.

But, just like all good things this experience fades with time. I wanted to build new amazing things and being one mere engineering pleb inside this gigantic organization makes that a difficult gambit. Perhaps if the organization was willing to explore more experimental / "internal startup" style work, I could be compelled to review future opportunities. There were plenty of problems to solve but getting a design meeting or a piece of IT infra to run something on were nearly impossible during my time there.

[sevensor]

I too worked at SAS early in my career, for about half a decade. It was a wild time; I learned a lot, rubbed shoulders with some incredibly bright people, got to visit the Kiheung fabs. I'm not at all surprised by the story, however, especially the scapegoating and fingerpointing when things go badly. The two things that ultimately made me leave were (1) there was no path to become an advanced IC, it was pretty well accepted that you'd burn out or go into management, and if you didn't you'd eventually get laid off and (2) being constantly told that American engineers were "not diligent" and that my 60+ hours per week, 24/7/365 pager carry, and mandatory weekend coverage, were not adequate. When your co-workers joke about taking PTO to leave early at 18:00, it's not a joke.

[xyzzy21]

This is where being a vendor (at a distance) tends to be as close as you want to get to some customers and their culture. Being a vendor is probably the best way to achieve that kind of "influence/innovation" in a company like Samsung.