Companies relocating out San Diego…

[The-Shoveler]

For what it’s worth one of the guys we hired from Canada was in his late fifties.

I see engineers at Cisco in their 50’s all the time.

I think you can get away with that in tighter labor markets like San Jose, I tell you it’s really crazy up there.
Don’t know how much longer that will last but if you have software talent and you really need a Job (and cannot find one in SD of course), that’s the place to go.

My two cents given the two options, (20 percent pay cut and haul my own stuff to TX) or San Jose I would head north, but that’s just my opinion.

[Coronita]

[quote=The-Shoveler]For what it’s worth one of the guys we hired from Canada was in his late fifties.

I see engineers at Cisco in their 50’s all the time.

I think you can get away with that in tighter labor markets like San Jose, I tell you it’s really crazy up there.
Don’t know how much longer that will last but if you have software talent and you really need a Job (and cannot find one in SD of course), that’s the place to go.

My two cents given the two options, (20 percent pay cut and haul my own stuff to TX) or San Jose I would head north, but that’s just my opinion.[/quote]

I guess I should have put in the disclaimer as well that the “age” rule typically doesn’t apply in Silicon Valley when it’s cooking like it is right now.. and probably will be for some time….I kept my a home up there just in case I would ever return there….Still get a lot of callbacks from old colleagues asking when/if I’m going to return… Unfortunately, things haven’t gotten so crazy to re-allow working remotely from San Diego (yet)….Maybe give it some more time….

Ok, maybe I’m just getting too old…..Been there, done that….

[Coronita]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/analysis-taiwans-mediatek-sets-backyard-200757486.html

It’s going to get bloody really really fast….

…And so the race to the bottom begins……

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Qualcomm Inc, the world leader in smartphone microchips, may want to shore up its defensive tactics.
Taiwan’s MediaTek Inc, the leading chip supplier for Chinese smartphones, is barreling into the U.S. market with a new major global branding campaign and setting up shop in San Diego, California, home to Qualcomm.
This year, MediaTek plans to hire about 150 engineers, business development and marketing staff in the United States, adding to a 300-strong U.S. workforce, said Kristin Taylor, MediaTek’s vice president of U.S. corporate marketing. Outside the United States, the company plans to add 1,000 employees in 2014, increasing its ranks by around 10 percent.
“We really feel that it’s a strategic area,” she said of San Diego’s Sorrento Valley, where MediaTek plans to open its new office in the next few months. It is home to many technology companies clustered around Qualcomm, one of the city’s largest employers.
“A lot of our technology partners sit in that area and we want to be able to serve them,” said Taylor, a former Qualcomm veteran who joined MediaTek last year.
MediaTek is relatively unknown outside Asia, where it has grown in the past decade to become the dominant supplier of low-cost cellphone chips, instrumental in helping companies such as China’s Xiaomi and South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc produce handsets that sell for less than $100 each.
MediaTek plans this month to launch a rebranding campaign highlighting its expansion beyond China and into the United States and other developed markets led by Qualcomm.
“We need to redefine that we really are at this point serving the entire globe and not just small pockets of the world,” Taylor said. She declined to give more details ahead of its launch.
Lacking relationships with U.S. phone carriers, MediaTek is unlikely to challenge Qualcomm’s command of the high-end phone market soon, analysts said. In the mid- and low-tier categories, the Taiwanese company’s ability to produce chips very cheaply is giving it an edge over other U.S. players like Broadcom Corp, Nvidia Corp and even Intel Corp, which are all trying to compete with Qualcomm.
MediaTek, whose stock market value of $18 billion surpasses Broadcom and Nvidia, far outsells Qualcomm in handsets aimed at Chinese consumers but it supplies processors for less than 3 percent of smartphones sold in the United States, according to Strategy Analytics analyst Sravan Kundojjala.
MediaTek believes its future chips will help manufactures make cheap phones that can compete in quality against more expensive devices made with Qualcomm’s components.

[The-Shoveler]

yikes !
I Should have switch to social media LOL,
I hopefully things will not get too dire.

[Coronita]

[quote=The-Shoveler]yikes !
I Should have switch to social media LOL,
I hopefully things will not get too dire.[/quote]

I’m predicting some consolidation that will happen in 2014…..I don’t think some companies are going to make it…. It’s going to probably going to end up being a 3-legged race with Qualcomm, MediaTek, and TBD 3rd player on the low end…..

Speaking of MediaTek…

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2096600/mediatek-wants-to-cut-cost-of-lte-smartphones-with-octacore-processor.html

MediaTek wants to cut cost of LTE smartphones with octa-core processor

Consumers will soon be able to buy LTE smartphones powered by a processor with eight cores for between US$200 and $300 without subsidies, thanks to MediaTek’s latest SoC (system-on-a-chip).

The LTE smartphone chip sector is becoming more competitive, with vendors like Intel, Broadcom and now MediaTek launching products to challenge Qualcomm’s dominance. MediaTek has helped cut the cost of low-end phones and now hopes to do the same with more sophisticated smartphones based on the MT6595 SoC, which was announced Tuesday.

The chip is based on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture and uses four Cortex-A17 plus four Cortex-A7 CPUs. The Cortex-A17 is ARM’s latest processor and was also announced Tuesday. It offers better efficiency and higher performance than ARM’s existing Cortex-A9 processor. To improve performance even more, MediaTek has implemented its own CorePilot technology to allow all eight cores to be used simultaneously.

“We want to offer great performance at an affordable price,” said Johan Lodenius, chief marketing officer at MediaTek.

After a little prodding, Lodenius said that smartphones based on the SoC are expected to cost between $200 and $300 without subsidies, which is in line with ARM’s thinking. The company said it is targeting midrange smartphones and tablets starting at $200 with the Cortex-A17.

On Monday, Broadcom announced LTE SoCs intended for smartphones priced below $300 without subsidies. Next year, the cost of the cheapest LTE smartphones are expected to be below €100 ($140), according to market research company CCS Insight.

The integrated LTE modem on the MT6595 is capable of speeds up to 150Mbps (bits per second) on the downlink and 50Mbps on the uplink.

MediaTek has also implemented some other interesting features, including hardware support for the new H.265 video codec, letting users record and play back Ultra HD content. Users will also be able to play back video using H.264 and VP9 codecs.

Smartphones based on the SoC can have 20-megapixel cameras and screens with a 2560 by 1600 pixel resolution.

Letting smartphone vendors build affordable devices isn’t just about developing low-cost chipsets, according to Lodenius. The company also offers so-called reference designs—which are essentially blue prints for how to put together a device—to speed up the development phase and lower development costs.

The MT6595 will be commercially available by the first half of year, with devices expected in the second half.

[livinincali]

[quote=flu]
I’m predicting some consolidation that will happen in 2014…..I don’t think some companies are going to make it…. It’s going to probably going to end up being a 3-legged race with Qualcomm, MediaTek, and TBD 3rd player on the low end…..
[/quote]

I’d agree. Mobile hardware is turning into a commodity just like laptop did 10 years ago. Do you buy the AMD processor or the Intel processor, but the replacement cycle slows down. You won’t have people replacing their smart phone every 2 years it will start growing to 3,4,5 years. Just like that laptop was good enough for 5 years back in the day for the average person. There just isn’t much need for more horsepower on a mobile device. You can always ship hard core computations to the cloud so why do I need more processing power and more battery drain on a mobile device. The most resource intensive thing I can think of on a mobile device is video processing, either decoding video or rendering video game graphics.

[flyer]

Interesting info about MediaTek. Imagine this should be good for the San Diego housing market in the general area.

When we invested in property in CV years ago, we, as many in San Diego, never dreamed the area would explode as it has, and it looks like it will continue to do so.

[spdrun]

^^^

Maybe in the long run, though 150 new hires in the US in 2014 is basically a blip for now.

[flyer]

You’re right, sp. I misread the article. Thought they were all relocating to San Diego. Our rentals in CV haven’t been vacant for years, so demand still remains high. It should be interesting to see if this addition to the tech landscape increases that demand or not.

[an]

flu, I’m not so sure about your 3-legged race part. I wouldn’t count out Intel if I were you. They seem to do a pretty good job with Broadwell and Haswell. If they can continue on that trajectory and integrate LTE (which last I heard should be soon), would be a force to be reckon with. They also just announced that they found a way to reduce GPU power consumption by 40%. That’s huge. They’re also aiming for the <$100 tablet market too. We'll see how this market evolve. MediaTek has been on a massive rise because of Android. My question is, what would happen if Microsoft decides to make WP and WindowsRT free. That's the rumor that I'm hearing floating around. If they do, it would give OEM huge incentives to switch over to Microsoft ecosystem instead of Android, since OEM have to pay both Microsoft and Apple (and in some cases, i.e. HTC, to Nokia as well) for every Android devices that they make. If Android goes into a decline and Windows increases marketshare, I think MediaTek would be in trouble, since Windows only support Qualcomm chips and full Windows supporting only Intel. It's interesting time ahead, but somehow, I think Intel and Qualcomm might turn out to be dual-opoly if Microsoft succeed.

[The-Shoveler]

We got a Windows 8 touch screen laptop for the home, I really like it. we also got a cheap Android Tablet which was a lot of fun learning/downloading the Necessary flash players etc.. I plan to write a few app’s for it just for fun.

But really the Windows-8 machine is a lot more practical for getting stuff done I can see the Windows tablets giving Android a run.

[spdrun]

Apples to oranges — one is a laptop with a touch screen, the other is an el-cheapo media consumption device. Albeit one more functional than devices cursed with iOS or Win RT crippleware.

[an]

[quote=spdrun]Apples to oranges — one is a laptop with a touch screen, the other is an el-cheapo media consumption device. Albeit one more functional than devices cursed with iOS or Win RT crippleware.[/quote]Then compare them with the Venue 8/11 pro, Lenovo Miix 2, etc. As a media consumption device, I think windows does a much better job accessing dlna server or any other devices on the network with media content.

[spdrun]

Oh, I agree. We’re still talking about two different evolutionary tracks.

One is a phone that grew a big screen and de-emphasized the phone features. The other is a laptop that grew a touch screen.

[joec]

[quote=flu]
I’m probably more paranoid than most people….My personal take about tech software in areas like mobile…. that if you haven’t gotten out of pure technical work and moved into senior management, you’re pushing it by the time you hit 40ish… Your shelf life goes quickly down afterwards….

Why? You’re more expensive than your peers, you’re probably less efficient than your peers, and even though you might have experience, people care more about how quickly things get done these days….And since things move rather quickly, you really have to stay on top of your game if you want to stay in business. This rule probably doesn’t apply as much if your work for the government or for the defense business, or if you run your own show and have established your connections…..but for tech companies in cut throat businesses, consider yourself warned….

I work in a cut-throat business… We compete in foreign markets with other foreign players. And frankly, some of the competition are on 7 day work weeks. We’ve been getting by… by employing people in 3-4 locations around the world so we can do roughly 24 hr development… The difference between winners and losers is drastic…. Winning means you probably have job security more/less at the same company most of your life… Losing at a company really means losing the farm….When you’re younger you had the energy and time to hop around…

It’s really funny because it’s really different from other professions like doctors or lawyers. You hear doctors/lawyers practicing in their 60ies…Much less in engineering…

I predict in about 1-3 years, I will probably be set off to greener pastures, whether it’s voluntary or not…But it’s expected…. I chose to remain technical all my career, since it was where my personal comfort and passion was….But it’s a double edge sword when you’re older.[/quote]

Pretty much in agreement with this. Older workers also come with more baggage typically and may not be “willing” to put up with all the longer non-stop hours needed to “win” like you say.

We have some friends at QCOM that are complaining with the amount of work, but as we all know, if you don’t do it, someone else will and everyone competes globally like you mentioned with the various articles.

Unfortunately, as we get older, I don’t think our bodies can take as much anymore. Working in startups way back, I used to go pretty non-stop too with night classes, etc…hungry for more tech knowledge…

Just got sick of it eventually and didn’t care. Nice that you’re still interested for whatever reason (paranoia, family, mortgage, “responsibilities” 🙂 )

Oh well, I think outside of computer/mobile/tech, I don’t think a lot of the other hard core engineering like materials, aerospace, mechanical, chemical are really the same.

Tech just moves too quickly and there is too much money chasing after things that everything is too accelerated.

Companies that are 1 year old can be worth over a billion…Pretty insane if you look at any other industry out there.

[Author]

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