Qualcomm reviews

Regular late night and early morning calls with India. Work life balance is poor. Targeted layoffs for employees over age 50. They claim they don't discriminate based on age, but if you look around at who gets laid off every cycle.... Promotion track is extremely political. The promotion from entry-level to journeyman to mid-level is just based on time in seat, but after 10 years exp, you need to be the right guy's friend to advance. Management is promoted internally, which means that nearly every manager and director is either a member of the pre-2010 old boys club or the winner of the latest departmental cage fight. Incredible amounts of infighting at the director level. Work teams are sabotaged or outright destroyed by Game of Thrones style politics a level above them. No training path for juniors. They are just expected to figure things out themselves. Morale is in the toilet. WLB and consistent layoffs have the office feeling like a funeral parlor. Offshore teams in India are coming for the San Diego workers' jobs, and the SD employees all know it. Zero innovation. The same products just get recycled over and over again. QCOM is stagnant technologically. Repetitive work. No real career growth. After staff level, you pretty much either just rest and vest, or start playing politics to get on the promotion track. If you join Qualcomm in San Diego, simply plan on being laid off in 3 to 5 years. Either you will tick the wrong guy off, your director will tick the wrong guy off, you will age into the danger zone, or an economic downturn will have the C-Suite offshoring your job to Bangalore.

- As mentioned earlier, documentation at Qcom sucks, you need to approach right people with right leverage and be very persistent, orelse you can't get things done on time. - Qcom internal tools suck. - If you have counterparts at different geo locations, work life could be difficult sometimes. While it's advantageous to have team spread out across multiple locations, it's very important have proper etiquette here. - Annual review process sucks, I hate matrix organizations, there a line manager whom you don't work with but, he/she is responsible for AR and there is a functional manager whom you work with on daily basis. This structure is stupid, primarily used for shifting blames.