Broadcom Reviews in San Diego, CA Area

Pros

good technology, active R&D, diversity in product lines

Cons

Startup style (good and bad)

Pros

flex time, casual dress code

Cons

unfair compensation and promotions, little acknowledgement of performance

Pros

a very good place to work, nice people, nice engineers. and the mentor is very helpful. I recommend the place.

Cons

It is a big company, sometimes it is hard to manage. The food is not good. But it has a lot of nice restaurants nearby

Advice to Senior Management

Maybe it could provides the new employees with more training programs. Need to manage the document( but is it hard for a big company to do so)

Pros

- Freedom to work on whatever you want to do
- They don't care too much when you do your work as long as you get it done
- Managers are chill, do not micromanage

Cons

- Managers sometimes are TOO chill, and don't give a crap what you do.
- Hard to find necessary information when needed.
- Some people sleep on the job.

Advice to Senior Management

Have a better mentor system for interns. Try to host better events for interns and new engineers to grow technically in.

Pros

Good benefits including Health Care benefits, reasonable work/personal life balance, aggressive executive management vision.

Cons

Not so great 401K matching, subjective time-off policy, fairly political setting and has issues most bigger organizations exhibit.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue with the employee feedback survey for gradually improvements.

Pros

- Challenging work
- OK compensation (but get worse each year)
- Relative stable company in this bad economy.

Cons

- No work/life balance.
- In fire fighting mode all the times, reactive mode.
- Lower level managers (in MPG) have access to you anytime (late night and/or weekends)
- Low level managers show no respect to teams
- No vacation time allocated. Need VP approval for more than 2 weeks but most of the times your managers won't even consider it so VP does not need to approve.
- Don't know who our HR representative is. If there is an issue with managers don't know who to turn to.
- Engineers are overloaded
- No support and encouragement for higher education

Pros

Always being challenged and learning. Room for growth.... freedom

Cons

Long hours... but there is a lot of innovation.

Pros

Good company and a competitive work place

Cons

Bad Management and some managers are bad humans

Advice to Senior Management

Promotion has to be fair else u will see a huge drain in future

Pros

Broadcom is a market leader in networking technology. Pretty everyone in the industry use their chips. Consequently, there is no threat to your job.

They pay a good amount of money. Stock options and RSUs. Benefits are outrageously good.

Cons

The primary issue is that being a big organization that has to please everyone, jobs are extremely compartmentalized. Therefore, innovation is only within the boundaries of the job assigned to you.

You will never get the big picture. In fact, it is not beneficial for the senior management to let everyone get the big picture.

Job growth prospects are fairly limited. The ladder to the CEO has close to 15 steps from the bottom, making it difficult to make any real progress.

Advice to Senior Management

The following summarizes my view of the processes in Broadcom

Customer: I need a more fuel efficient transportation from San Jose to LA

Sales Team (comes back to Broadcom): Guys, space travel is on the roll. We need a vehicle to the moon.

Architecture team: We need a scalable solution. Design one that can go to the sun.

Management: Do it in one month. Make sure that there are no bugs.

Design: I can design a tri-cycle in a month. Sales team, convince the customer that this is good enough for this requirements

Software: What is a tri-cycle? Oh..yeah. I remember now!! Ok.. I need 3 months to fix a seat on top.

If I translate this to networking jargon, I don't think it would be too far from reality. Over design and over provisioning seems to be the order of the day (everything is Texas size). Often this leads to significant design pressures, bugs and in the end money.

On a serious note, I found that the design team is fantastic but is the most under appreciated by the management.

Pros

They hire very talented teams.
Good opportunity to work while going to school.
Not a bad place to work and gain experience as an intern.

Cons

General employee treatment is below standards.
Most managers are technically strong but inefficient at managing people.
You really have to be lucky to convert your internship to full time.
Stop Treating interns like slaves!!!
Try to be on-par with competitors like Qualcomm. Learn how they treat their employees and use that as a role-model.
Overall, not the best experience if you are joining the company now. It's only the upper management and people with tons of RSU's who have all the fun working at this company.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't try to low-ball when making offers to entry level employees.
Train your HR to understand and know the market out there.
Your low-balling tactics will cost the company in the long run.