-Engineers and many other employees, including operators, are overworked. Engineers are penciled in for 50 hours a week. They are given way too many responsibilities because the company needs to reduce costs by understaffing critical roles in other departments such as training and supervisors for operators. The result is engineers often work around 60 hours a week just to keep things running at an acceptable level. However, our salaries are based on 40 hour a week industry data. The company is forced to do this because we couldn't keep up with pricing, costs, and quality from companies that manufactured in Asia. Eventually, engineers get burnt out. The company doesn't pay well enough, or provide perks that most other companies provide to incentivize long work weeks. For example, many respectable companies provide transportation (not necessary in Raleigh, but just an example), subsidized cafeterias, guaranteed baseline cost of living raises (because that's really the only respectable way to treat employees), significant bonuses that are guaranteed, stock options that are worth something, and a better 401K match. Cree doesn't need to provide all of these. Obviously the stock option plan wasn't bad, it just isn't worth anything. But upper management needs to put other real incentives in place to demonstrate they really care about their workers. Otherwise, there is no incentive to sacrifice time with family to work long hours for Cree.
-The company used pathetic incentive programs that were not based in logic. They set really high goals and demeaning rewards such as pizza parties. Cree didn't understand that in order to get employees to care about the success of the company enough to work long hours and really care about their work, you must provide good working conditions, fair pay based on 50 hours a week (that is 25% more than the industry average data that is based on 40 hours a week...very significant amount), and a fair review system (more on the review system below). Historical examples and case studies prove that this is an effective method for motivating a work place, raising company morale, and boosting performance. Like anything in the real world, making money requires investments. And investments in employees have paid dividends historically; unfortunately, pizza is not a proven method for incentivizing adults. There are many examples of how companies have invested in employees, and Cree should take a hard look at some of these case studies. Cree should not think they can't provide this because of the size of the company or the market they operate in. Those are excuses to avoid solutions they don't like because it takes money away from the board of directors..even though it is an expense that will be well worth it, upper management would rather consistently fail to meet their short sighted goals than think about long term success.
-Upper management shows little interest in the employees. For 10 years of service to the company, employees are rewarded with cake and a plastic pin made in China. That is not an appropriate way to show appreciation for loyal employees. Upper management needs to take a hard look at what this says about them. It sent a pretty clear message to me and everyone else I worked with - they do not care about their employees. A 50 cent pin for 10 years of service is a travesty. Why should employees be loyal and work 50 hours a week for a company that shows them this level of disrespect?
-The review system was supposedly an assessment of one's "value to the company". However it was filled with subjective metrics that had absolutely no tangible correlation to money or value. Some of the best techs that worked under me contributed a great deal to yields and quality. They were extremely smart, hard working, and experts at their jobs. Yet they would get docked on areas such as attitude or continuous improvement that would put them out of promotional range. I found it difficult to work there knowing that these techs were putting in so much work for the company, but they were getting demotivated because their work was never recognized. Continuous improvement, although important, cannot be directly correlated to the value they added to the product (more on this in a sec). Attitude is too subjective, and again, does not offer insight into the yield improvement and quality control measures taken. Either design a review system based on actual value that can be quantified, or just admit that the review process grooms sheep to passively accept low raises while being brainwashed into thinking you have to perform at an insane level to get any raise whatsoever. Management should keep in mind that there is a right way of incentivizing continuous improvement. Common sense suggests that putting someone down repeatedly just to give them something to work for is not a proven method of incentivizing improvement. You have to give them the means to improve through training opportunities while rewarding their hard work simultaneously. Both are required. Both were never a part of Cree's review process.
-Upper management made too many miscalculations a few years ago, and they are not learning from their mistakes. There are three major miscalculations that all tie into the same end result: not investing in operators, operator training, and more supervisors to properly manage the operators; not investing in automated wafer transportation systems and automated assembly line tracking systems; not investing in better facilities and tool upgrades quickly enough despite a clear trend for years that the company was going to take off. I'm not suggesting we needed an intel style fab, but we needed a dedicated effort to minimize pulling wafers in and out of boxes and cassettes at every step using vacuum wands. No investments were made. And investments currently being made are nothing more than patchwork jobs that are most definitely insufficient. That combined with operator training causes a huge quality risk to the product. Wafers are transported from operation-to-operation by loading them into cassettes and boxes and walking them to the next operation. In some cases, the next operation was in a different facility so wafers were driven over there. You could hear the wafers clinking around in the boxes while walking with them. Upper management didn't staff the training department appropriately. The training staff there is great, but they need more to fulfill all of the duties of training. There are so many operators and the training staff is spread out way too thin. The result is a damaging cycle: operators are rushed through training --> they make mistakes (break wafers or misprocess wafers) --> yield drops and quality tanks --> they are given poor performance reviews and miniscule raises --> they are demotivated and don't care enough to focus on their work --> more mistakes --> yield and quality suffer --> etc, etc, not to mention this causes high turnover rate, adding to the inexperienced and poorly trained department. That combined with the paper tracking system where operators would sign off in pen for each operation before passing it off to the next caused way too many misprocessed wafers. Yields and quality suffered. Customers fled. Cree decided to build a new facility that would help streamline the process and add capacity to a company that was growing rapidly, but RMAs were off the charts from the run down fab facility they operated in and customers fled. We no longer needed the capacity and the building remains empty to this date. This is a lack of foresight by upper management. Unfortunately they didn't learn from their mistakes. What was even more frustrating is they were never held accountable for these decisions. The directors get raises that far exceed the raise percentages they allocate to the departments they are in charge of despite being solely responsible for missing revenue goals. "Cree is we"? No. Cree is upper management when it is successful. Cree is the engineers/engineering leads, operators/supervisors/training, and techs when things are not going well.
-The company saved money by tricking employees into working beyond their pay grade. Techs were enlisted into doing engineering work, but they were not put on engineering salaries and their titles were not changed to engineer. They claimed they wanted to see you prove that you were capable first. Management needs to think about what they are saying when they do this. A respectable company should pay their employees for the work they ask them to do. If an engineer takes on added responsibilities such as direct reports, then they need to be compensated for it. If a tech is doing engineering work, then their title should be engineer and they should receive engineering compensation. If it is outside of the budget, then do not ask them to do engineering work or pressure them into thinking that they must continue doing engineering work on a tech salary or they will never move up. That is an atrocious way to treat employees.
-Management used the excuse "That's the Cree way" to justify pursuing illogical courses of action. Many times, it was understaffing key areas and making changes that were so illogical that no one could come up with a legitimate argument in favor of that change. The company performance over the last three years is evidence that 'The Cree way" is a failed business model that will likely be studied at Harvard Business School for years to come as an example of how not to run and expand a manufacturing company.
-At one point, I was happy working at Cree because I was successful in my position. But I began to see, from talking to friends and reading other companies' reviews on glassdoor, that Cree is not a well managed company, and unfortunately it does a really poor job of keeping employees happy because they don't value employees and they fail to reward hard work, good performance, and loyalty. When I quit working at Cree and started a new job, I realized that the extent to how poorly run the company is and how poorly they treat employees was way worse than I thought. It's sad that a company can disregard their employees and treat them so poorly without acknowledging it and working toward real solutions. I'm glad I left as the quality of my life has improved by orders of magnitude (that would actually be quantifiable in Cree's metrics), and I suggest that all candidates interested in working here pursue other options where you will be valued instead of belittled. Cree is not unique with cutting edge technology and a high upside. It is only unique in its poor treatment of employees. There are many many companies out there that provide higher salaries, require less hours, provide better incentives, and provide a better path toward career development because they put more effort into making sure their employees are on a good track. To give you an example of how employers typically show appreciation for dedicated employees: my new employer provides respectable selection of coffee and tea (not just 1 type of coffee that you have to go to a specific break room for because for some reason each breakroom has a different pack..my HR department also doesn't claim to be experts in tea-coffee selection psychology to justify cutting back on options); provides subscriptions to high end training sessions and a significant stipend to pursue additional training and education (without a 2 year agreement), project managers stop assigning projects if they estimate that your current work load exceeds 40 hours a week; and managers meet regularly with direct reports to construct a personalized career development strategy. This isn't anything spectacular. It is the norm. You can find a better job where you develop the skills necessary for senior engineer and management positions. You will regret joining Cree or staying there. Your work will never be appreciated or recognized.
