Working in IT at Qualcomm is filled with cons and few positives. IT staff are second class citizens, playing second fiddle to developers and "real" engineers. Yes they bring in the money, but a professional IT degreed engineer is not compensated or looked at in the same way as a developer. Since the "real" engineers are fairly spoiled, IT is constantly being pulled at their whim with little planning or time to do it right. Highly reactive, which often results in less than optimal IT solutions. Engineers then look down upon IT for providing half-baked solutions, even when we were totally left out of any up-front planning and they need something "yesterday".
Corporate IT is also highly siloed, and people get put in a box and rarely let out. If you are an Exchange administrator, then you have zero insight into storage, virtualization, networking, etc. Or maybe all you do is administer load balancers. Very little cross-discipline training or exposure. This stunts IT skills and IT careers. Everyone has their rice bowls, and getting major tasks accomplished that cross multiple groups is very painful. The helpdesk tries their best, but lacks good training and skilled staff. Extremely high turnover, and not very happy customers.
Because the perks and company are good overall, the poor IT performers stay and rarely seem to leave. Getting HR to fire someone is nearly impossible and takes 6-9 months if not more, even if the person clearly is not even remotely performing at their level. HR is highly risk adverse, which causes major pain for staff managers and makes the teams suffer.
Bottom line is if you want to work in IT, don't go to Qualcomm. If you are a skilled software developer or hardware engineer, Qualcomm may be your perfect job.
