InterDigital Reviews

Pros

Good pay for very senior level engineers and managers

Cons

poor pay to junior engineers

Pros

Salary
Incentive plan
Good location for families

Cons

Suffocating, unexciting environment
Unstimulating work
Personal development opportunities very limited.

Advice to Senior Management

Look closely at past achievements of new hires and use that to carve a challenging career path for them.

Pros

a very relaxed pace of work, good base salaries, good bonus and compensation, freindly atmosphere, job stability, very good work- life balance

Cons

insufficeint technical challenge, poor middle management who does not care about proffesional and carrer growth, most people are near retirement- very few young and dynamic people. Dfifficult to change groups- easy to be stuck in a rut

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce the fat!. This is a top heavy organisation. Add more young engineers. Make promotions more uniform. Allow people to change groups

Pros

Most co-workers are great; a few are dead weight.
Reasonable pay
Flexible working arrangements (although this is getting more restrictive now)
First-level management mostly cares about their people (that's changing too)

Cons

Poor work-life balance (company doesn't care if it works you to death)
Upper management has no regard or respect from employees
Typical political correctness from HR, but it's all a smoke-screen to hide lack of employee regard
Poor employee morale due to management practices
Declining level of benefits, at ever higher prices
Company is not an innovator; just follows the market and focus is on low price, not quality

Advice to Senior Management

Realize that the company's success is due to the hard work and creativity of your employees, NOT your tired and worn-out strategies and me-too policies. If you want the company to turn around, stop focusing solely on costs and start treating your people like the professionals they are; support them and encourage innovation and create an environment where the morale can improve

Pros

Inter Digital is a small company that focuses on the design of patents for cell phone technology. There are many opportunities to learn from an experienced R&D team. Everyone seems very motivated and there is a very good feeling of respect between employees (corporate politics exist but are kept to a minimum).

Cons

The employees are very skilled technically and tend to keep to themselves. You really need to engage yourself in discussion with other employees more so than at other companies. However if you make the effort, everyone seems very happy to help.

Advice to Senior Management

Seek to improve the efficiency of communication. Emphasize small meetings and discussions between a few people over large time-wasters. I spend way to much in "required" meetings. (This may not apply to everyone in the company but many of my co-workers have voiced this same concern).

Pros

Small, friendly, people know the stuff well

Cons

Not enough brand name power compare to Nokia, Ecricsson.

Advice to Senior Management

bring more interns and get them have a full view of the company instead of just the sector they are working on. Too specialized for a student.

Pros

- Stimulating atmosphere for the technically minded (engineers)
 - Get to interact and work with really smart people (company employs several ph.ds)
 - Very diverse employee set
 - Management very open to adopt innovations suggested by engineers

Cons

- Company has only single source of revenue (patent licensing)
    - should diverge into product development too
 - How about cabins for all employees instead of cubicles for just engineers

Advice to Senior Management

- Open a company location in San Jose and San Diego, where there are lots of engineers
   (company locations are actually kind of "remote" from engineering talent)

Pros

One of the pros with InterDigital is the opportunity that people get to work on latest technologies. There is lot of freedom to move from one area of work to another within the company.

Cons

There is no concept of work-life balance for people working in the product teams. Working for 6 days a week with really long hours each day is quite common. These crunch times lasted up to one to two years instead of a few weeks/months which is the norm in many technology companies.

Advice to Senior Management

InterDigital started product development, hired a team and laid of people and repeated this process three times in the last 9 years. It should put more thought into what it wants to do in the product space before actually hiring the people and bring in people with product experience into the exec team. It is completely reliant on patents that are either silly or are good but about to expire for all the revenue and this can not be the long term plan of the company.

Pros

It is a very challenging environment with a lot of very interesting projects. The technologies you work on are very cutting edge and there is a lot of exposure to patents and standards. You also have many opportunities to contribute to standards and write patents.

Cons

The company is very patent oriented and is still unexperienced with product development. Also, the product requirements vary rapidly and this creates more pressure on the employees.

Advice to Senior Management

I would tell them to try to get more feedback from the employees. It seems that they could benefit from receiving comments directly from the people who work on standard/products, rather than receiving them from the (lower) management.

Pros

Small Company. Nice compensation. Flexible work hours

Cons

Growth prospects nil. No recognition to small fish. Full of Directors/VPs
Executive management lacks direction and leadership

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce the meetings and discontinue using powerpoint slides during All hands meeting