The swinging axe

[Coronita]

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 🙂 )

 

[img_assist|nid=5962|title=selfportrait|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=100|height=80]

—– Sour grapes for everyone!

[an]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[SD Realtor]

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

[SD Realtor]

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

[SD Realtor]

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

[SD Realtor]

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

[SD Realtor]

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

[lonestar2000]

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. 😛

Ok guess I’m a bit off topic here, back to your regularily scheduled programming. 😛

[lonestar2000]

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. 😛

Ok guess I’m a bit off topic here, back to your regularily scheduled programming. 😛

[lonestar2000]

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. 😛

Ok guess I’m a bit off topic here, back to your regularily scheduled programming. 😛

[lonestar2000]

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. 😛

Ok guess I’m a bit off topic here, back to your regularily scheduled programming. 😛

[Author]

Posts