Walk into any lab and it's all T badges, half of them pink. It's the future of Qualcomm as the IP portfolio is thinned out by flat LTE networks and modems grow into more and more a commodity like WiFi modems. The glory days are over.
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W/R/T IT terminations being a priority: You forget that QC has more lawyers than God! Several cases in wage and hour law in both state and federal court have held that IT workers who don't do particularly skilled technical work can be classed as wage and hour workers--even if they were hired on salary and with benefits. What does this mean for QC? It means that instead of being to work their butts off for 60-80 hrs. per week at the fixed salary rate, for the promise of a green card, they may be able to sue for back overtime pay plus interest. Also, class actions are expensive.
@ 75898: I disagree. Opportunity would ultimately justify investment. The problem is that in order to find that EUREKA! opportunity that justifies the expense of R&D, companies have to be willing to spend the money for the "best and the brightest" people in cutting edge STEM disciplines. In the case of Qualcomm, that would require hiring in software, applied mathematics, and hardware development--instead of engineers who would be lost without Windows, or who merely supply "the biggest bang for the buck." It also usually requires more time to develop such IP if companies are not willing to throw adequate resources for R&D. In the tech world, time is often a luxury that one doesn't have, when the newest "shiny object" rapidly obsolesces to become yesterday's news. If you're not willing to do this, the company is pretty much stuck milking it's present IT for what it can get, and watching it's top employees bail when the effluvia hits the proverbial fan--as it recently did with Qualcomm in China. Companies also need to reward executives based on incentive rather than for retention--as Qualcomm does. While many people here feel that "old, fat, & lazy" engineers can easily be replaced, there is a proportionately exponential relationship between executive rank to their lack of indispensability. (They tend to pride themselves on their ability to stab each other in the back.) Unfortunately, it's difficult to ditch the founder's son....
One thing that QC and its employees don’t want to admit is that QC is not capable of growing beyond mobile. It is not that it is not capable, but the opposite. QC has been too successful to a point where opportunity in tens millions of dollars is not enough to justify investment. QC only has option to go after huge markets, but those are riddled with competitions, where QC does not have licensing tool as a competitive edge. Going head-to-head in IC design prowess, QC does not have enough performance advantage to overcome lower cost competition. All that mobile success really means that QC can only be good at that market, as many other companies are good only at their own markets.
Anonymous75721, it might be worth discussing but it does not matter what is said here as far as "avoiding layoffs". This board has as much influence as Yahoo Finance board or the kool aid drinkers on siliconinvestor. (BTW, it's great over there. they now are convinced SS waged an UNFORGIVABLE media war against S810 and furthermore owes ALL it's success to QC. So these companies, clearly so riddled with jealousy of QCT/QTL, must bow down and never dare to bring their own competitive solutions to market (e.g. Exynos)). Apple fanboys think Apple invented the smartphone in a vacuum. QC fanboys have an equally distorted but opposite view, as if QC is the ONLY giant whose shoulders the mobile world stands on.
I said it before. IT is one of the areas they could outsource 90+% of it and no one would really notice at QC, because QC isn't in the software/IT business. It's overhead. Get over it. That's reality. Find a better job if you are in IT elsewhere.
Alright, someone is rehashing old posts, but those are subjects worth discussing, instead of getting distracted by chanting glorious QC or going off in racial diversion. If we are serious about (avoiding) layoffs, then we got to get serious about QC direction.
both posts are reposts of comments made in earlier threads. 3 minutes apart. I don't know for sure, but what are the odds of two different people doing late night copy-paste. Maybe Tinder ran dry.
how do you know the other one was also his post?
in this post, commodity chipsets crush QC licensing due to LTE baseband competition and achilles heel of IP portfolio. in your post 3 minutes earlier, commodity chipsets are impossible due to QC bullying competition using iron fist of IP portfolio. so which is it?