Qualcomm

Onsite gym, San Diego weather, and onsite training courses, assuming you have the time to attend.

Countless! Management is terrible in this company. The place is heavily political and hostile. The environment inside the company is dog-eat-dog.

For each person who gets a "good" performance review, an equal number of people must receive a "bad" performance review no matter how well they have done, since people's performance has to follow a bell curve distribution. This leads to cutthroat internal competition. Backstabbing within the team is encouraged and rewarded.

My manager asked me blatantly to spy on my coworkers, find mistakes in their work, and write those things in reports behind my coworkers' backs, since I am popular and respected among my peers. When I refused to do so, he threatened me that he will lower my performance and I will miss a promotion.

I tried to look for another group to switch to within the company but failed. Switching groups via IOS is extremely difficult and almost impossible without the help of your manager, so if things aren’t so good between both of you then forget it; you better find a job at a different company.

HR folks are useless and liars; don’t ever think of going to them with a complaint. They will almost always give you the wrong advice and will contact your manager behind your back and tell him that you came to them with a complaint, even if they promised it would be confidential. The HR department is just there to protect the company from any possible lawsuits; they don’t give a damn about employees. HR is a useless department completely.

If you don't want to get chewed up and spit out – and that can happen at any time – don't work there. The pay, which is below average, and benefits aren't worth the stress; it can make you physically ill.

If you want to be a “good” performer by their standards, you are constantly stressing about being visible, not upsetting the wrong people, and trying to stay ahead of your peers by any means. If you have ethics, generally you don't do well. I know people who have done some truly unbelievable things to get ahead.

If you aren’t cool enough then you will be singled out and targeted, even by people you don’t work directly with. Be careful; don’t let yourself be an escape goat for their failure. People advance in this company by backstabbing and connection with corrupt middle/upper management. You have to be your manager’s favorite pet to get a promotion. A bad manager can really prevent your career growth no matter how well you performed or what other people think of you.

The performance review process at Qualcomm is entirely flawed and completely subjective. Managers have the right to veto and override all 3rd-party feedbacks on an employee. They use this to create phony PIPs to eliminate anyone who dares to question their practices.

They hire a lot of fresh college grads with PhDs to do menial bench test work and treat them like indentured servants because most of them are foreigners and they need visa sponsorship to stay in the country. Qualcomm likes to hire PhDs straight out of college to make sure that they don’t have previous work experience, so they don’t know that the workplace could be better elsewhere, and work them 24/7 in a killing environment. What they say in the interview is completely different from what the actual job is; a lot of sugar coating. The work is boring, repetitive, requires basic programming skills or not at all, copying and pasting. Basically, the positions are low-level engineering jobs that a technician with an associate degree can perform; however, the internal policy requires that the job is filled with recent grads holding advanced degrees. Utilizing your knowledge is frowned upon because that threatens your lead/manager’s image and makes him look weak. Most likely your work will be stolen by your lead. Managers are unappreciative, insulting, and downright rude. If you have a PhD, don’t waste your hard-gained education or time here.

Foreign nationals in the company from India and China alone constitute more than 90% of the workforce (diversity?!!). Those foreigners gang together, speak their own language in meeting rooms, labs, and hallways, and, shamelessly, hire and give promotions to their own kind. They hide work-related information and keep the information within. They also gossip and share departments’ internal matters with their buddies in India and China. That creates a hostile environment for people who aren’t racially/ethnically related to the group members or not from the same region/village.

Mid-level and upper-level management are insecure and totally useless and clueless; they are there just to collect status from the engineers who do the actual work. Those managers create a lot of useless meetings, wasting the engineers’ precious time, while spending the majority of their day resting and vesting.

The list goes on and on. That caused a few people to commit suicide by jumping from the 11th-floor balcony in the San Diego campus. That just shows how horrible the environment is for foreigners to kill themselves in a company that claims to be one of the best 50 companies to work for in the world! If you are well-educated, have morals and values, then think twice before joining this unhealthy environment.

Working at Qualcomm feels like living in a third-world country on American soil.

Managers are a hopeless case. Get rid of most of them, seriously.