Qualcomm

• Excellent benefits such as an extremely well-matched 401k, free healthcare, dental, and vision.
• Decent salary with yearly reviews.
• Good company culture with good people and very little red tape compared to other companies.

Wage increases and bonuses are based off of an opaque algorithm (based off of inputs from your yearly review). Qualcomm simply offers you an increase off of this algorithm and does not allow you to negotiate at all.

Qualcomm also gives out large sums of RSUs instead of cash bonuses. This is supposed to incentivize you to stay with the company and work to increase the stock price, but ultimately it’s a way for them to have you chase a golden carrot for the rest of your career. You essentially lose large amounts of money if you end up quitting, and the value of your bonus is tied to the price of the stock which is subject to fluctuations in the stock market.

It is unlikely for you to end up in a high-level position as there are too many people at the company for substantial growth.

Qualcomm uses ancient custom software, and in general has a terrible development environment that makes the job unbearable.

Because of the bad development environment, a lot of the work ends up being administrative, rather than being productive.

Work-life balance can be out of whack depending on customer needs.

Invest in your developers.

Qualcomm refuses to take feedback from workers and often forces them to make their own changes behind management's back before they will support helpful changes.

I would recommend having a policy similar to Google's, where employees can spend 10-20% of their time working on projects they think would benefit the company.