Qualcomm

Pay is competitive with tier 2 tech companies.

Excellent benefits:

• 15% discount stock plan with a lookback.
• Fantastic health insurance.

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' experience, 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 three to five 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.

Sell the company. Your hardware is stagnant, and you're coasting on your patent portfolio. Just get acquired, pull the golden parachute, and have the new management fire all the headcount in SD. It's the same thing you were planning to do anyway.