Qualcomm

Very nice and friendly colleagues and managers, very easy to communicate with and offer help when needed.

Great benefits, especially the health plan.

Poor work-life balance; too much work falls on too few resources. People are leaving, at least partially due to the large amount of work, endless meetings, late-night conference calls, and etc. Meetings scheduled for one or two hours usually end up taking more than four hours in the evening with the Asian team. Don't expect to take on responsibilities such as picking up kids from school, and etc., if you work in the hardware (especially the chip) team.

When people leave, no new resources are added, and the people who remain have more on their plates until they get burnt out and also decide to leave. This forms a poor loop.

Too complicated design flow. Even when re-using an IP and not making any changes, the long checking list from design review is impossible to finish during normal hours, not to mention new IP development. Mid-management continues to add items to the checking list to address newly popped-up bugs in products, without adding new resources. They just want to ensure new items are added that can catch the bug, and they don't care how much more execution work is added to engineers. They also never consider that some items on the checklist are unnecessary and can be removed or replaced by newly added ones. The result is the list getting longer and longer, with engineers who execute the work becoming more and more overloaded until burnout.

Compensation is, if not poor, at least not good. Compensation is competitive if compared with the average semiconductor industry, but since Qualcomm considers itself a tier-one semiconductor company, HR should compare compensation with top companies such as Apple, Broadcom, TI, and etc. Before joining QCOM, I worked for another large IC company in a low-cost state. My first-year package after graduation was more than my first year at QCOM, even when I already had a couple of years of experience. Ironic, right? At the end of 2015, after one year of hard work, my bonus was only a three-digit number. Yes, you read correctly. This is in San Diego, a place with a high cost of living.

Simplify the engineering flow or hire more resources.

Reduce the number of meetings and accurately control the meeting time.

Raise compensation to the level that tier-one IC companies pay.

CEO seems quite technical but lacks business vision.