Poor work- life balance, too much work on too few resources’ shoulder. People are leaving, at least partially due to the large amount of work, endless meeting, late night conference calls and etc. Meeting scheduled for 1 or 2 hour usually ends up taking more than four hours in the evening time with Asian team. Don’t expect to take fallibly responsibility such as pick up kids from school and etc if you work in the hardware ( especially the chip) team.
When people are leaving, no new resource is in and the people retain has more in his plate, until he got burn out and also decides to leave, this forms a poor loop..
Too complicated design flow. Even re-use an IP and doesn’t make any change, the long checking list from design review is impossible to finish during normal hours, not talking about new IP development. Mid management continues to add items on the checking list to address new poped up bugs in product, without adding new resource, they just want to make sure new items are added that can catch the bug, don’t care how much more execution work added on engineers. And they don’t ever consider some items on the check list is not necessary and can be removed/replaces by the new added ones. The results are the list getting longer and longer, engineers who execute the work are more and more overloaded, until burn out.
Compensation is, if not poor, at least not good. Compensation is competitive if compared with average semiconductor industry, but since Qualcomm looks itself as tier one semiconductor company, HR should compare the 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 is more than the first year at Qcom, when I already have couple years experience. Ironic, right? At 2015 year end, after one year hard working, bonus is only 3 digit number, yes, you read correctly... this is in San Diego, a high living cost place.
