Good CEO, too many middlemen - Anonymous employee Rambus Employee Review

- A good company should have lots of "value creating engineers" and a few managers/hands-off engineers. Rambus has lots of management and hands-off engineers, but very few hands-on engineers who create value. - Trying to launch products, but there are still lots of design IP projects which don't ever create $$. - Very strong old boy network in parts of the company. Most Rambus VPs and Senior VPs are white Americans. While many of them are cosmopolitan, many of them give more responsibility to people with similar cultures whom they are more comfortable with. One would expect responsibility to be given based on performance - that's not always the case. - Performance-based incentives are far less compared to other Silicon Valley companies. - No real vision. Just boosting stock price is not a vision, like a previous reviewer said. The single-minded focus on boosting stock price leads to frequent cost cutting and layoffs to boost the next few quarters' EPS (which hurt the company in the long run). - Company has a reputation for not-so-good professional ethics. While the marketing team is trying to change this perception in the industry, some of the company's behavior is still on the borderline of what can be considered ethical. For example, people are frequently laid off just 3-4 days before their 6 month bonus payments (often worth $30k-40k) are due. These employees are out of a job unexpectedly, and at the same time the company relies on fine print to deny them money they believe they've earned.