Qualcomm

Free sodas in the break room, an office with a door, lots of vacation time.

Three pay cuts this year.

The first, in the form of a benefits cut, took our health benefit from one of the best in the country to one of the worst.

The second, in the form of the announcement that there are no more bonuses.

The third, in the form of the rest of the investing world recognizing that our business decisions are really bad and dumping our stock like a load of moldy garbage, causing us to fall nearly 50% since the moment the Jana Group bought us out and replaced our board's visionaries with spineless used car salesmen.

I literally just watched you serve notice for layoffs for engineers with multiple high-value patents on the wall. You sacked an entire floor of extremely skilled coders on the same day the India office announced it was hiring.

Our focus on the stock price is killing our ability to produce top-level innovation, and that's going to kill us in the long run.

And yet, meanwhile, the layoff axe seems to have missed most of the middle and upper management that wouldn't know efficiency or project management if they walked up wearing name tags. If you're looking to cut costs, look to your wildly ineffective project and program management, not the people who are actually making your innovations.