Qualcomm

• Progressive and good at recognizing and rewarding talent.
• Very competitive salaries and benefits, although they are starting to pull in the reins a little bit.
• Friendly and humble managers who actually listen to and respect employees.
• Management seems to have a very clear understanding of goals, and it trickles down well all the way from CEO to low-level managers.
• Flexible with days off and work-from-home days (if you can swing it; remember you will probably need hardware access most days).
• Probably the most intelligently-designed performance review system I have ever seen. You could get a promotion even if your immediate boss does not like you. It is all based on what your peers, team leads, and managers think of you. Other companies could really learn from Qualcomm here.

• Long work hours and tight deadlines.

Everyone in my office put in at least 60+ hours each and every week almost without fail. The higher you're promoted, the worse it gets.

• E-mail hell.

Nobody uses proper bug tracking software, release software, and documentation is poor and scattered everywhere, so everyone e-mails everyone with everything. You end up with hundreds of e-mails a day, maybe 1% of which you actually care about. It wears you down after a while.

• This is not a software company; they're a hardware company that writes driver software. So expect poorly written and poorly designed code written with a "just make it work" mentality.

• Too many products and little-to-no code reuse, so instead of focusing on having one good codebase, you'll end up with 50 crappy ones.

• Everyone is really stressed and tense, so the culture around the office is not the most pleasant.

• If you work in the Markham office, it's a satellite office and San Diego HQ makes sure you know it at every turn. Expect super slow VPN access, 4-6 hours to sync using P4/Git, no on-site gym except for the hole-in-the-ground in the basement that they'll reimburse you for.

Management is actually doing a good job driving the company with a clear message and goals, all the way down from CEO to low-level managers. Your review system is awesome.

BUT I would really consider how hard you drive your employees. I hear management say, "we want you to have good work-life balance," but I don't feel like they mean it. Everyone I talk to always seems exhausted, and I can't help but think to myself what quality of work you're getting from someone who can't remember what outside looks like.

If you want good quality software, you have to invest in improving the codebase you already have or you'll scare away talented developers. Get some courses on software design and get your employees trained up. It's scary that almost no developers knew what Dependency Injection is, or Factory Pattern, etc.

Computer science is important, whether you work at Google or you're developing drivers for a SoC.