Home Depot is not the only company closing branches. A mid-sized (200+ employees, 100+ consultants) high-tech company is shutting down their San Diego operation.
If you guys who need engineers want to shoot me your info, I will have many resumes to send your way (I will screen the good ones for you).
Who is it? Can you say??
Sun announced layoffs today, but I can't see them shutting down their entire SD operations.
It's not Sun.
Sorry JWM, I can't say yet. They are publicly traded and the info is confidential. I feel lame for being so secretive but surely I would tell you if I could.
I can say that it is an excellent resource to pick up some very talented software, systems, and hardware designers. I want nothing in return other than to see these friends get jobs (although these aren't the types of engineers who remain unemployed for very long).
If anyone fancies a move to the bay area, we're hiring too.
Nostra, I'm going crazy with all the search strings on google to figure out who it is. I have a solid guess...but no point going further.
I understand you are not allowed to share any more information. If you know some good folks there, how can we get in touch with them?
Likewise, my Raytheon branch in Santa Barbara has a few openings right now in Process, Product, and Systems Engr
If you like, please email me with your name and company. I will give this info to the candidates.
spammers_must_die [at] live [dot] com
Nostra I know of something that just happened. Two letter company for those of us in the telecom world.
Anyways yeah I heard about what happened last night. Lots of good guys over there.
SD Realtor
Two letter company for those of us in the telecom world.
Is there that many two letter company in telecom? :-). I'm sure BCOM, QCOM, & Nokia will absorb a couple hundred easily.
LG would be my guess. It seems they have some issues.
Weird because my wifey is going overseas to do recruiting. Guess they "can't find talent here" whatever that means.
selfportrait
----- Sour grapes for everyone!
true, for someone outside telecom, they might also guess LG, but LG only have 30-50 engineers max here in SD.
Haha I see SDR has some connections...
I'm learning a lot here. I didn't know about Sun's layoffs and I didn't know LG was here in SD.
FLU, "can't find talent here" sounds like fancy talk for "can't afford to pay more than peanuts". What kind of talent is she looking for?
Haha I see SDR has some connections...
I'm learning a lot here. I didn't know about Sun's layoffs and I didn't know LG was here in SD.
My second guess would be L3, which I think is also having problems. You'd be surprised who is here in SD if you really look. Google is in Irvine. Yahoo is in Carlesbad and Rancho Bernardo (well at least for now :) ) Microsoft has a presence, IBM has a presence, so does NetApp and I believe EMC. Huawei has a presence, and my neighbor who is CEO of a large chinese telco is probably going to open an office here or irvine soon. San Diego has decent diverse tech, just not a lot of the same thing. Sun's presence here has been small relative to sun, mainly hardware support. They've been cutting back every year. The site here is virtually no-existence. The main reason why the office is probably still here is because several companies out here still uses a lot of equipment from them.
FLU, "can't find talent here" sounds like fancy talk for "can't afford to pay more than peanuts". What kind of talent is she looking for?
I think it's just general embedded software development. VwWorks/Linux embedded for wireless telco systems. I'll find out more details. I was surprised they are going overseas to recruit. I don't buy the "no talent" here argument myself. It sucks to be good but unemployed, meanwhile while companies are recruiting overseas.
If you know people that's interested in QC, I'll forward some resumes to her and her group. Just have your colleague's send email to my yahoo account: fat_lazy_union_worker [at] yahoo [dot] com... Sorry about the email handle though. One of these days, I'll grow up and change it when I reach puberty.
I would have thought the sinking dollar would have made it more cost-effective to keep employment here. Oh well. I guess we work in the only industry that doesn't keep pace with inflation. Have you folks thought about that? Take a P.C. for example. You work in a tech field which a PC costs less than 10 years ago, despite how much the dollar has devalued...Hmmmmmmm.
selfportrait
----- Sour grapes for everyone!
Nostra remember I am a 20 year engineer here!
Actually I may have been wrong about telecom... it is part telecom and part semiconductor. The company is TI. I heard about it last night. Seems to me it kind of came out of the blue but I am on the outside looking in there. I have heard varying degrees as to the size of the layoff but I "think" it is non trivial.
Anyways yeah FLU lots of diversity... as most of us old codgers know a heavy amount of our ancestry can find roots back to Link A Bit... Of course the old GD had quite a work force back in the 80's... Also though yeah lots and lots of small/medium size companies here... Comcast has a digital design team with embedded firmware development... Moto has alot here (my old stomping grounds for many years)... all kinds of support companies for EDA tools and services... I could go on and on...
Nostra I am not sure if TI is the one you heard about but it is the one I heard about.
SD Realtor
Nostra remember I am a 20 year engineer here!
Actually I may have been wrong about telecom... it is part telecom and part semiconductor. The company is TI. I heard about it last night. Seems to me it kind of came out of the blue but I am on the outside looking in there. I have heard varying degrees as to the size of the layoff but I "think" it is non trivial.
Anyways yeah FLU lots of diversity... as most of us old codgers know a heavy amount of our ancestry can find roots back to Link A Bit... Of course the old GD had quite a work force back in the 80's... Also though yeah lots and lots of small/medium size companies here... Comcast has a digital design team with embedded firmware development... Moto has alot here (my old stomping grounds for many years)... all kinds of support companies for EDA tools and services... I could go on and on...
Nostra I am not sure if TI is the one you heard about but it is the one I heard about.
SD Realtor
Oh crap. We know a lot of people from there. Or I should say, we knew a lot of people that's beem steadily quiting over the years. I think the ultimate downturn was when Nokia pulled out of the CDMA market, which TI had been a supplier to. That's too bad, because when I was at the Barcelona mobile conference, they actually had a pretty impressive demo of a phone running Google's android platform. More so than the breadboard version that QC was running. TI's wireless program has been in the toilet for the past couple of years, so unfortunately it's not really a surprise. I just thought that enough people had already left that there wasn't that much more attrition. Well, anyway, if you know anyone that is interested in the QC, let me know.
Anyone know about what's going on with NextWave (II)? My guess isn't not in that great of a shape either. I was around to see Nextwave (I) unravel. When I saw this company reborn, specializing in WiMax, I thought oh my. WiMax is going nowhere.
I guess seeing all this turmoil, with all due respect to you embedded folks, I'm sort of glad my wife and I don't do the same thing, let alone work at the same company. Though it's probably not as much as a big deal to find embedded positions out here than web 2.0+ enterprise crap that I do (no really, I really enjoy doing what I do, except the days things break :) )
selfportrait
----- Sour grapes for everyone!
SD R, when you say two letter company in telecom, TI was the one that first pop into my head. I'm pretty sure BCOM would have no problem pick up those 200-300 engineers. They were aggressively poaching from QCOM. I hear people from QCOM getting 20+% raise if the jump to BCOM.
Are the other companies like GOOG, YHOO, etc even have a big presence here? I don't see much of them driving around. All I see is QCOM, Sony, Nokia, MOT, etc. Personally, MOT might be the one we should be watching next. They just announced another 2500 layoff, on top of the 2 layoffs they had last year. With them spinning off the wireless division, what would be a big uncertainty. There's at least 200+ in the wireless division here in SD.
The other question I keep on pondering about is, what will happen to QCOM when VZW goes to LTE for their next generation. The no long have the strangle hold they do now with CDMA.
Yeah the BCOM division out here started off back in the 90's and was established by my old supervisor. The division down here started as a focus for developing the chipsets for cable settops. BCOM actually licensed the technology from General Instrument. General Instrument manfactured settops, cable head end equipment and home satellite systems. Our design group designed the ASICs and we licensed the technology to Broadcom, Motorola, and ST Microelectronics in exchange for pricing breaks on other components needed in the boxes that they had
So BCOM ends up starting a group down here to use code we gave them to manufacture the same custom ASICs, and then resell them back to us and other manufacturers. Also my supervisor got in a spat with a VP of ours and went to BCOM right after this all went down to run the small group there. Of course over the past several years the team down there saw a HUGE expansion primarly due to wireless. Anyways just a quick history lesson... Pretty crazy stuff...
Agreed about MOT. Awhile ago MOT Broadband basically spun off what was left of settop group to Comcast to build cable security cards known as PODs, (Point of Deployment Modules) I think that the majority of staff at the MOT building up on Sequence is either wireless or sales of some type. However I will say that there are probably 75-100 people there still in the broadband group.
SD Realtor
VwWorks/Linux embedded for wireless telco systems.
I think you meant VxWorks. That stuff is a pain to fix when it breaks on a device. We have over 100 wireless routers from Froundry deployed in our enterprise. They work well enough, but if the code gets corrupt and the thing won't boot, oh my! VxWorks' command set leaves much to be desired.
I'll work on IOS based device recovery any day before I'll touch VxWorks. There is a reason why these engineers are being laid off. :P
Ok guess I'm a bit off topic here, back to your regularily scheduled programming. :P
SD R, when you say two letter company in telecom, TI was the one that first pop into my head. I'm pretty sure BCOM would have no problem pick up those 200-300 engineers. They were aggressively poaching from QCOM. I hear people from QCOM getting 20+% raise if the jump to BCOM.
Are the other companies like GOOG, YHOO, etc even have a big presence here? I don't see much of them driving around. All I see is QCOM, Sony, Nokia, MOT, etc. Personally, MOT might be the one we should be watching next. They just announced another 2500 layoff, on top of the 2 layoffs they had last year. With them spinning off the wireless division, what would be a big uncertainty. There's at least 200+ in the wireless division here in SD.
The other question I keep on pondering about is, what will happen to QCOM when VZW goes to LTE for their next generation. The no long have the strangle hold they do now with CDMA.
AN,
BRCM may very well soon to be having a hiring freeze. There was a time when disgruntled QC senior engineers who kept getting passed for promotion where being offered double promotions 20% salary adjustments so I heard by jumping to broadcom. It reminds me of those days when QC people got sold to ericsson and stayed there because ericcson threw double promotions and highly inflated salaries to keep people from quiting. We all know what ended up happening to those folks from Ericcson. I wonder if a similar fate for some brcm people if they ever reduce headcount too.
The problem with a lot of these companies in SD is that they aren't headquartered here. They have smaller sattelite offices in SD, which when push comes to shove, will be shut down if the economy is tough. Ericsson, TI (which was a company TI bought), even BRCM.
Qualcomm is an exception and probably the bellweather out here. And that is the carrot stick they love to dangle, even when I was there in the early 90ies. I remember a job fair they had back in 2003 or 4 (I forget when exactly), when over 600 people showed up for roughly 60 positions. But those that know, also know it's a big company now. And it seems like they're becoming the microsoft of wireless, big company, limited upside that quickly needs to reinvent themselves for the next gen stuff. Well, it's no different that Microsoft or any other big company for that matter. As far as other companies. Here's what I know (wireless telco's and defense companies excluded).
*Sun: very small support office. Did some support and hardware firmware code maintenance. Had massive layoffs a few years ago, and are basically still out here only for support.
*Cisco: very small support office in Carmel Valley
*Intuit: off 56 freeway. is a fairly large employer out here. While hq'd in Mountain View, they bought Chipsoft awhile back ago based here, which made TurboTax. As such, san diego's site is probably the second largest site next to the Mountain View.
*Yahoo: Carlsbad and Rancho Bernardo: has a presence of about 150-200 people out here in san diego (at least last time I checked). Part of the group up in Carlesbad does Search Marketing and was part of Overture that was bought by Yahoo. The other half was part of a Yahoo Music (formerly Musicmatch). Well, we know what's currently going on with Yahoo, or I should say soon to be MicroHoo, or GoogHoo, or YaAOL. So it will be interesting to see what happens here.
*Divx: UTC area. They Ipoed last year, and did ok last year. I heard they just went through a RIF.
*Pricegrabber.com: UTC area. Don't know size.
*WebSense: Sorrento Valley. fairly large office (internet security and web filtering. You probably don't know them, but most companies use them to prevent you from looking at porn at work).
*Google: Irvine. not sure about what they do in Irvine. One of these days, I'll take them up on the interview offer.
*IBM (don't know location) is out here in a big way as an IT consulting arm.
*FairIssacs (Carmel Valley): though I hear they regularly go through a RIF.
*HP (Carmel Valley, Rancho Bernardo) has a pretty big presence here.
1) Printer division is out here
2) They bought Peregrine Systems as they try to move into Enterprise Software/Sass (remember them?? Hint fraud/accounting scandal).
3) They also bought a few small mobile value add service companies, like Bitfone.
*Kodak (Rancho Bernardo) though the company is on life support
There are a bunch of other companies from the bay area that farms out work down here. Bay area people like to hop around, companies find people slightly more reliable down here, and slightly cheaper.
* Some media companies
Real/Rhapsody
Veoh (Based in san diego with offices in L.A.)
PacketVideo
* Storage companies
*NetApp: very small support office in Carmel Valley
*EMC: small office i think
*DotHill
I guess it's not all doom and gloom. I guess from my observation, most of the non-embedded (enterprise/web 2.0 software type) positions have already gone through some drastic cuts here around 2004, that sometimes there are skills shortages and in some cases we're hiring.
VwWorks/Linux embedded for wireless telco systems.
I think you meant VxWorks. That stuff is a pain to fix when it breaks on a device. We have over 100 wireless routers from Froundry deployed in our enterprise. They work well enough, but if the code gets corrupt and the thing won't boot, oh my! VxWorks' command set leaves much to be desired.
I'll work on IOS based device recovery any day before I'll touch VxWorks. There is a reason why these engineers are being laid off. :P
Ok guess I'm a bit off topic here, back to your regularily scheduled programming. :P
Sorry, I fat fingered. Yes, I meant VxWorks. Stuff made by WindRiver.
selfportrait
----- Sour grapes for everyone!
FLU I heard Websense is strong man. They are private yeah? You think they will ever go public?
I also keep my eyes on Entropic. Lots of old cats like me over there.
SD Realtor
FLU, thanks for the write up. It seems like SD have a pretty good selection. Unfortunately, most of those are satellite offices, so they'll be the first to get shut down if the company goes through a rough patch. It's definitely not all doom and gloom though. But I guess to some on here, these jobs doesn't exist and so, there's no ways there's enough people who can save any money for a down payment.
FLU I heard Websense is strong man. They are private yeah? You think they will ever go public?
I also keep my eyes on Entropic. Lots of old cats like me over there.
SD Realtor
Websense is actually public already. (WBSN)
I'm not an expert in the security/content filtering field. At one point in my career, I worked for Symantec, which BTW appeared very disfunctional...But anyway some of these security companies are having a real tough time these days, because a lot of this stuff is quickly becoming commoditized. And they are running into the same problem that just about every big tech company these days are running into. They are desperately trying to find the next big "growth strategy". Because a tech company with a "value" valuation is a death march to getting delisted from Nasdaq (or NYSE).
Symantec saw the writing on the walls a long time ago, even when their stock was hitting 50-60/share and when everyone on wall street was thinking they would be unstoppable. Internally they were shitting in their pants because they knew the AntiVirus/Security market would get saturated when Microsoft announced they were jumping in in and once networking companies started to think about offering hardware based security with software bundles. Symantec started to try to reinvent themselves during their peak, bringing people like me in to help build new products. I didn't stay long, because I didn't think execution and direction was going to work, and things got really weird. Pretty soon, Microsoft did enter the market, and Juniper Networks and Cisco acquired a slew of security companies to shore up hardware and software based security, and suddenly the security market because extremely crowded. On top of that, Symantec did something imho really weird. Instead of building up their expertise in security, they diluted their knowledge by buying Veritas (a file storage company). To this day, I don't get the synergy between file storage and security, and doing such a large acquisition probably set them back in security with every other competitor entering the market. Hence, the $17-18 stock price now. On the other hand, Macafee, focused on what they did best (besides being involved in accounting scandals :)) and turned the company around.
WebSense isn't a pure security player. They do a lot of content filtering apps and mal-ware detection. But like I said, it seems like stuff like this is getting commoditized pretty fast. People seem to expect this stuff should all be free and cheap, just like PC's. They're well off their all time highs too.
That said, I can tell you what i think is the latest buzzwords in the IT space these days. "Service Oriented Architecture", "Cloud computing", "grid computing". Fancy terms for having a pool of computing/storage resources that you can reuse. In other words, buy your IBM stock now. It's only a matter of time before mainframe makes a comeback. There is nothing "innovative" about enterprise software. It's a cyclical process between client/server distributed computing and mainframe/centralized computing, depending on which way the wind is blowing in the industry. All the hoopla is around the new programming languages and buzzwords that enables the prevailing strategy that was invented by a bunch of companies trying to make a buck by convincing you the "new paradigm" supported by the new hardware/software they are trying to sell you is better than what you bought last year. And once again Sun Microsystems is late to the game, as usual.
It's also why if you want to play in the enterprise software space for a long long time, it's much easier to be an architect than a raw programmer. Programming and programming languages change all the time, and you can't compete with the kid out of college. As an architect, once you seen a couple of architectures, it pretty much all looks the same. There's only so many design patterns you can practically apply in real systems.
selfportrait
----- Sour grapes for everyone!
FLU, thanks for the write up. It seems like SD have a pretty good selection. Unfortunately, most of those are satellite offices, so they'll be the first to get shut down if the company goes through a rough patch. It's definitely not all doom and gloom though. But I guess to some on here, these jobs doesn't exist and so, there's no ways there's enough people who can save any money for a down payment.
At this very moment in times, does appear slightly gloomy. In the short term, I've been hearing a lot of about companies doing hiring freezes. It seems like some companies are in the wait-and-see economy mentality. There's no doubt there's a lot of companies out here. The question is, how many of them still have open reqs. I hope it turns around soon.
selfportrait
----- Sour grapes for everyone!
WebSense isn't a pure security player. They do a lot of content filtering apps and mal-ware detection. But like I said, it seems like stuff like this is getting commoditized pretty fast. People seem to expect this stuff should all be free and cheap, just like PC's. They're well off their all time highs too.
I built a malware filtering proxy using open source products and commodity hardware. It's meets our needs better than most of the commercial stuff out there.
However, my gig is one of the few where we can get away with using Linux and other open-source products. Lots of folks will only purchase commercial software.
Flu pretty good list, and something to keep in mind if there are RIFs where I work.
That said, I can tell you what i think is the latest buzzwords in the IT space these days. "Service Oriented Architecture", "Cloud computing", "grid computing". Fancy terms for having a pool of computing/storage resources that you can reuse. In other words, buy your IBM stock now. It's only a matter of time before mainframe makes a comeback.
I completely agree, nothing does back-end storage, processing, and delivery better than a mainframe. You can put whatever you want on your front-end servers that format and spew out web documents in XHTML/XML to your clients, but the real back-end storage and processing that will be necessary to support 100Mbps on-demant IPTV/streaming media to homes and mobile devices (100Mbps on Cellular networks has already been demonstrated) is going to be run on big iron. No cluster/grid networks of computers will be able to keep up with the kinds of demands we're going to see in the coming days.
I am a network tech today but I do have mainframe operations experience, and it is all coming full circle. I can't wait to get back to running mainframes again!
No cluster/grid networks of computers will be able to keep up with the kinds of demands we're going to see in the coming days.
Google has proven you wrong many times over.
I heard over the weekend a rumor that HP in Rancho Bernardo has some major layoffs coming. Looks like they have recently cut in Oregon and Idaho. If this is true, I wander how this will effect inventory in RB/4s for those employees that own.
Hp's axe has been swinging for some time now. Ever since Hurd took the helm. Good for shareholders, bad for employees, as some will probably say. Most of the printer R&D is in china now.
Good news is that friends have said there are quite a few "printer" startups in S.D. Not sure why there would be so many printer startups, but oh well, I have to take what they say to be accurate (not in my line of work).
I also heard the ax feel at Kodak recently, though some folks are getting a pretty hefty severance.
The ax also fell at Nextwave.
The ax also sort of fell at Intuit (small axe, i think)
And the ax also feel at BAE systems.
Good news though is it seems like folks I know that got impacted were able to find something pretty quickly, except the folks that are in senior managers/directors/vp's. Guess in downsizing times, it's sort of better to be a technical grunt than a non-technical "people manager".
I think for example, websense is hiring, and it seems like hiring is picking up at Nokia (sort of recovering).
On the other hand I "heard" Broadcom isn't doing too well (San Diego office). I heard they're need to find a customer for their WCDMA chip or else (and you can speculate what the "or else") means.