Intel is just too large. There're 80,000 employees worldwide, and the site at Hillsboro, is the largest one in the States. You're just a tiny clockwork at this huge machine. No matter how good you are, your quality of work tends to be averaged out by the less competent (or less motivated) people in your division. And even if you did work, nobody notices. If you really wanted to, you could work there for years without ever actually having to produce a single thing of worth to the company or your co-workers.
You can't blame the employees for that. You have 10 to 20 layers of managers on top of you. If you want to initiate any projects to do, sure go through all the managers layer by later and get all the approval forms.
Appraisal at Intel is a once per year process and it is a SELF-review. So there's not really any feedback process. Bonuses and reward depend more on your team's political power at the upper management. So if you're at a small team, or your manager isn't a very tactful person, Good luck.
