Once an AMAZING company, squandered by horrible leadership
Pros
Very amazing technology, and some fantastic, collaborative, awesome people that still exist throughout the company. OK pay and benefits, but it is common knowledge that the salaries are dictated to be slightly below market averages in N.A.. In the past year or so, the mostly-fairly-new executive staff at least appears to be *trying* to respond to low moral after all of the off-shoring and layoffs. And in San Jose, at the corporate headquarters, there's a sparkley new Gym!
Cons
Xilinx went from having a very popular, charismatic leader named Wim Roelandts, with a very obvious interest in the companies technology, people, and culture, to the most uncharismatic, incompetent CEO in the history of CEOs. Wim was a very charismatic leader, both internally and externally in the industry. The executive staff of his tenure took great measures to avoid layoffs during the big downturn from the "dot-com bubble" bursting in 2000. Wim took a 20% paycut, and the rest of paycuts were on a sliding scale according to the salary grades - from 15% for the Senior VPs, down to no paycuts for hourly workers. Hiring freeze, salary freeze, mandatory extra vacation, and an extra Summer shutdown were all instituted, and Xilinx was one of very few semiconductor companies in the Valley that avoided a layoff - and in the ensuing years, they gradually backed off on all of the cost-cutting measures. The result was a huge pride amongst employees, and the company coincidentally dominated the programmable logic marketplace. Xilinx participated in the Fortune Magazine's Top-100-Companies to work for in the mid-2000's, and consistently ranked at the top of the charts - several times breaking into the top-10. Xilinx was very well known to be a great company and a great place to work. Unfortunately, those who had been at Xilinx since those days witnessed a complete paradigm shift in the corporate culture from one that had encouraged hiring the best, most talented and passionate engineers and workers and taking great measures to foster internal collaboration and innovation, to one filled with political infighting, fear, competition, and anti-collaboration. The new CEO is quite poor at public speaking (see him in any public interviews? Isn't this a key part of a CEO's job?), has no real interest in the company's technology (known to get mad at people who try to talk about Xilinx technology with him at offsites), and has demonstrated absolutely no care for the corporate culture, people, or technology that existed at Xilinx before him, other than keeping some shining stars that make him look good and whatever gets him to his short-term bonus targets. And unfortunately, this mentality has trickled down. Long gone are Xilinx's CREATIVE internal values. The new CEO and his staff have successfully instituted a corporate culture centered around internal-competition and fear. They carried out the first publicly announced layoff in the company's history in June of 2008, shortly after the new CEO took the reins, and followed it with a second layoff about 1 year later, never doing anything whatsoever to deal with the bottoming-out moral. Meanwhile, Xilinx chewed through a few Executive VPs of HR - an obvious bellwether of a deep-rooted problem. Don't agree with the treating employees like cattle, and flipping the company? out! They instituted "stacked ranking" focal reviews along with the layoffs, and the company continued to bleed-out it's talent - many great people left on their own volition. In 2014, HR tried to offer a feux-change in the focal review system, which ultimately just turned out to be the same thing with a different name! Every employee found it was a total joke, but most middle management didn't dare to provide that feedback to their superiors. Many of these issues exist to some degree at a lot of mid-to-large size companies, but at Xilinx right now the issues are on the border of being out-of-control. In the short-term I expect the company to continue to innovate and do well - they are deriving new products and technologies following an outstanding history of development and delivery. There are still a lot of great processes and people, many of which/whom have been there for a long time. There are great individual contributors and lower level managers that exist throughout the company, and the brand is solid and still held in high regard with the customer base. Those employees who love to compete (as well as those who maybe occasionally backstab) will do quite well. But, in the medium/long-term, unless there is a big flip in the executive staff, I expect a potential collapse. We'll see...
