[quote=deadzone]FLU and AN I assume are hiring for niche type positions within the wireless industry. San Diego is one of the (or the) hub for that industry so that may explain why you are not finding qualified applicants in Florida.
But I still don’t agree with your logic that folks are coming to San Diego en masse for the “lower” cost of living due to remote work. Just because you have anecdotal examples does not make it an actual thing. As Rich asked, where is the evidence that more folks are moving here due to remote work than are leaving? It is far more logical to think more folks would be leaving. Your wireless engineer making 200K would live like a king in most parts of the country.
Of course leaving SD to work remotely could be risky too. If the work from home trend is short lived, which I think it will be, then you could be screwed trying to get a job in your new locale down the road.[/quote]
Actually, it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything in the wireless industry. Short of Qualcomm/Broadcom stock option bandwagon, Qualcomm/Broadcom is a pretty bad place to be if you are mobile application engineer, because they really don’t have any commercial mobile applications that make money in any meaningful way. It’s not their core business. So if you happen to work on mobile apps for Qualcomm/Broadcom, you are not making money for the company. You are a liability that will eventually get right sized if the rest of the core business isn’t doing well. If you’re an embedded software engineer, or work on chip design or do wireless design, it’s a great place to be. Application software engineer, I can think of many places that would be better. My current company is more IT’ish than pure wireless/mobile tech company. I don’t consider a company as being a tech company if the CEO doesn’t have a tech background, and mine doesn’t.
But my point was that it’s a misconception that those high salaries will be generally available. For example, as it stands, I’m going to be paying $140-50k for a mid-level mobile engineer maybe 4-5 years of experience. But there’s a wrinkle. That person better know his sh1t.
I get a lot of resumes that try to pass themselves off as a mid-level experienced mobile engineer, but I would say 70-80% of the resumes end up in the trashcan. And the ones that I phone screen, 10% make it to the panel interview. And we haven’t been happy with any candidate that makes it to the panel interview. … For instance, I get a lot of folks claiming to be a 5-6 year mobile IOS engineer. But if you take a look at their resume, most of them wrote an app on their own, something along the line of a simple “Fart Sound App” that a middle school kid probably can do, published it, and claimed that the years it took to develop that “Fart Sound App” counts as the 4-5 years of experience.
I’m sorry, if the bulk of your mobile IOS engineer experience is creating a homegrown fart sound app that maybe has 10 reviews on the apple store, those years it took you to develop the fart sound app don’t really count as relevant experience. And while I was a self-taught mobile engineer, it was different….When I learned about Android or IOS things were still relatively new and not many people were working on this…so it was quite likely self-taught people who were highly motivated people knew more than the industry…and what I self learned, it was pretty comprehensive beyond just programming the api…enough to understand how all the intricate details of of the OS so I could modify the OS, or add a new Bluetooth stack or add additional Bluetooth profiles or convince google to throw away Bluez and replace it with Bluedroid, partly an attempt at the time to fvck over Qualcomm/Atheros that was heavily dependent and invested in Bluez..and force them to reintegrate their chipset wit a brand new bluetooth stack theyve never seen before, that we had been developing since Bluetooth was first conceived, making their connectivity solution look really shitty in a new stack….in the same way they made our baseband solution look shitty… ha ha… that also involved having to work with google to fix a bunch of race conditions in Google’s Bluetooth Manager some of their engineers accidentally injected into the AOSP codebase. Pretty ironic, considering that I probably would never pass the Google interview process to be on their Android Bluetooth team, but there i was fixing bunch of concurrency shit some of their engineers who must have passed those IQ interview tests accidentally injected in the AOSP framework. but that’s beside the point.
These days, if most of a person’s experience is from their own app with a handful of reviews, and they haven’t really done anything mobile related in a professional environment…sorry, that says they aren’t really an experienced mobile engineer…
It’s also interesting to look at their educational background. Most of the candidates don’t have a CS or Engineering degree/training. Not that an CS or Engineering degree is absolutely necessary to be a good mobile IOS or Android engineer. But you see some of these candidates were a B.A. major (nothing wrong)… Took a 7 month online IOS mobile “immersion course” (with no prior software/programming experience), somehow managed to be “lead instructor” for IOS mobile software engineer immersion course (despite the extend of their experience is 7 months crash course on IOS, again with no prior programming experience), and on their resume counts both of those things as part of their 4-5 years of IOS mid-level experience….And the funny part, I see a bunch of other candidates that fit the same profile….I don’t even need to phone screen those candidates, or give them the take home “write an app so we can review” interview takehome assignment. I know it will be a waste of time… Still, occasionally I let one go through with the interview process, just to see if I might accidentally overlooks someone with sheer natural talent….I haven’t found one that is….
