Sr Hardware Engineer - Anonymous employee Qualcomm Employee Review

3.0
Oct 16, 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Competitive pay for SD area - Lots of great people - Lots to learn technically and smart people to learn from - Interesting products to work on - Flexible hours - Fitness facilities in almost every building - Great city to live and work in

Cons

- Non-optimal management structure (too many cooks in the kitchen) - Going through cost reduction, so lots of penny pinching - Engineering teams being outsourced, or under threat of outsourcing to India - Bell curved performance reviews - Promotion quotas to limit number of promotions per review cycle (in some teams) - Arbitrary "minimum-time-served" promotion prerequisites regardless of whether employees deserve it or not (in some teams) - Executive management taking vast sums of money as bonuses and skimping on bonuses for the little guys - Very large company, so you get buried in corporate culture and bureaucracy at times - Career advancement has a ceiling in a lot of teams due to top heavy nature of this company - Recurring layoff rounds lately

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5.0
May 13, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Work life balance is really good, colleagues are both kind and techinical

Cons

Pay salary range is medium

4.0
Jun 27, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great design team. Learn a lot in the project. Great resources for self motivated technical improvement.

Cons

Big wave of talented engineers leaving in some critical departments. CEO lacks responsibility on the company development. CEO and CFO have been selling their stocks a lot every year.

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