Are there really no other decent options in San Diego other than Qualcomm? It would perhaps be difficult to find another company that offers the same benefits, but surely there must be other companies around?
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Samsung, MediaTek and Intel has sites in San Diego
Samsung, MediaTek and Intel has sites in San Diego
Bad side of job hunting in S.D.: If you don't have the skill set to appeal to a headhunter, and you look under the "engineer" category on job sites, everybody is listed as a freaking "engineer!" So you not only have to sort through the usual flavors of hardware and software engineer, but IT management engineers, production/management engineers, quality control engineers, environmental engineers, architectural engineers, civil engineers, highway engineers, sanitation engineers (janitors), and security engineers (Guys with guns who know how to use Windows, I guess....) The good part is that there are jobs out there. The fact that SM "doesn't get software" is what's scary. Word is that he's willing to trash his most experienced software people in the next year to save a few bucks and appease Wall Street. The chipset gravy train is about to run out of steam. The big moneymaker down the road will most likely be applications people never knew they needed, until someone creative comes up with them. That's not going to happen with a work force compised primarily of @$$kissing toadies. If you're young, don't be afraid of start-ups. But go into a situation with your eyes wide open. What is their venture capital situation? Does their CEO actually know how to run a company, and do they appear to have decent managers? Make sure you know what you're worth. Don't settle for less out of desperation. Make sure that even if the company goes belly-up within a year, will you learn or improve your most marketable skills. And don't do something supremely stupid like buying a million-plus dollar house in Carmel Valley. If you need a house, buy a fixer-upper, fix it up while living there, (face it--if you work at a start-up you're not going to be there most of the day...) and then sell it and move on.
There are plenty of opportunities. BUT, usually people who know don't want to advertise it for obvious reasons. IF you are a hardware engineer or specifically a wireless systems engineer, it's much harder for you because your choices are one of our 2-3 competitors that have offices here, or one of the few startups that will probably go under in the near future. Apple has a info session in San Diego. Apparently they are bringing an entire recruiting team down here in the next few weeks. You can find much better opportunities if you are a well rounded software geek that can do mobile app and embedded because you can play both fields, and in many cases bridge between the two layers. If you are in this category, you're opportunities look really good right now, well at least outside of Qualcomm. Steve's new direction is to focus on chips. He doesn't get software. So software takes a second seat. That's why he recently got rid off all those innovation groups that Qualcomm use to do in software (and yes did layoff a some Qualcomm engineers.) Meanwhile, the rest of the industry is starting to focus on software, because for many chip companies they've already come to realization that hardware and chips alone is saturating, and to close the deal and to differentiate among the other players, it's the software that goes with the chip that sells. That's why there's companies like NXP work so closely with Google for the NFC stack, and why it's no coincidence that NXP is #1 in NFC on the mobile front. There are other companies that do the same thing, basically using software to vendor lock an OEM to a vendor specific solution. Qualcomm use to do this too, though it's getting much harder as (in the case of Android) the opensource framework is getting more powerful and what was once proprietary only features is now more readily available. It also didn't help QC when other companies were able to switch out the stacks that android uses, and broke a lot of our proprietary things we depended on. But we can't complain, because we do the exact same thing, so what goes around comes around. Hence, what solutions that are much cheaper but "good enough" is starting to get more and more important than simply having the "best" solution at a premium cost.
San Diego Zoo has field animal waste engineers.