[Coronita]

[quote=spdrun]What’s wrong with giving advice, even if it’s outside people’s usual comfort zone? If it’s outside the comfort zone, many people won’t think about it, so it’s valid.[/quote]

Pay isn’t comparable. That’s why. Come on… I’d consider teaching for “fun” and as a voluntary basis. But as a profession? No thank you. I admire the ones willing to do it. And besides you won’t me indoctrinating your kids 🙂

[Coronita]

[quote=Hobie]http://ddmgaragedoors.com/index.php

This guy is great. He will sell you the springs and will even take your call if you have questions.

Changing these springs is not difficult. While you are at it, consider the Liftmaster jackshaft opener. Mounts on the side leaving more room in the center of your garage. Quiet too.[/quote]

Thanks. So I found out that the reason why most places don’t sell springs alone is because some people are have been seriously hurt when they tried to install it, so people don’t want the liability.

I’ll file this place for future reference.

I found these guys in Clairemont…
http://www.allproqgd.com/

I can’t get the pulleys to wind up correctly, so I need to redo things…Monday’s suck.

[Coronita]

[quote=spdrun]ACE Hardware on University if you don’t want to enrich that piece of filth named Bezos?[/quote]

wrong kind of spring. I need the torsen ones that go sideways.

Sigh.. I can’t seem to find a spring dealer. Looks like no one wants to sell the spring as a part for fear of llability.

Sheesh…

[Coronita]

[quote=rockingtime]This is not true
My friends from qcom had to look for a job but were forced to austin n ba

sd job market scks in general for hi tech like EE,[/quote]

It depends on what your friend specifically does. EE is a broad field. .It could mean everything from asic design to wirless protocol development to RF system engineering to DSP. Some will have problems finding a job. Some wont.

You won’t understand if you’re not an engineer or not a EE person.

[Coronita]

[quote=paramount]Sounds like a miserable place to work (Q).

It’s a lesson taught all to often: if at all possible put yourself in a position where you can survive if you find yourself out of work. If you’re over 40 it can be very difficult to find similiar work, and if you do it will likely be at a considerably reduced rate or in crappy work conditions.

The 1st thing I would do is move to Texas.[/quote]

There’s no way in hell Q is a worse place to work than some of the defense companies that my colleagues worked at, one in particular in Rancho Bernardo. Just saying…

[Coronita]

[quote=rockingtime]Sd is very limited when it comes to finding new opportunities.
Better to have a paycheck n peace of mind in tx then having sleepless nights in sd[/quote]

It depends on what you do….There’s plenty of opportunity out there if you have the right skills even in tech.

[Coronita]

.

[Coronita]

Well, I won’t try to predict how much home prices will be affected by this anymore. I’ll just patiently wait and see if it does, and if it does, I’ll jump in, since I doubt I’ll be relocating out of SD for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, I’ll grind away at paying off my primary and my last rental, so that if opportunity comes around, I can take out another loan, and buy another primary, and mortgage my life away again…Lol.

[Coronita]

I think more appropriately, the title should be “Oh, to have bought real estate 40 years ago” 🙂

I am jealous. We have a family friend in her 80ies and they bought a tiny beach house in Del Mar for under $100k about the same number of years ago…. What a killing.

[Coronita]

[quote=svelte][quote=flu]
As far as lateral move svelte, plenty of people do it. I just did. No pay increase
.maybe even a slight pay cut.[/quote]

And you did it for stability as I said, no?[/quote]

Yes, me personally, but plenty of people did it well before this “stability” issue came up. I think some of them did it because they thought Q had a bigger name alone, because we use to top whatever Q offered (I guess not anymore), and in a last ditch effort to keep those folks, pay never came up as an issue back then. Q wasn’t even offering signon RSUs toward the later years of their hiring for some folks in certain groups where they went. Seems like they were selling them on a vision of being at the Q was worth something considerably more. Sort of an ironic twist, that those guys are in the dept that are going to be cut the most i think.

[Coronita]

[quote=no_such_reality]What you described flu is the way H1-B is supposed to work, staffing of a position with niche or difficult to find skills. When you look across the country how many do you see like them?

As opposed to were I’ve see many h1bs, windows support engineer III or the equivalent.

I have no concerns with the program being used for niche requirements, I do when it’s used for rank and file.[/quote]

Again. I am sure the abuse does happen. But personally, I haven’t experienced or witnessed it from the employers I have been at. I see a lot more emphasis on companies moving the entire operation abroad, which is what it think people need to be concerned about if they are really concerned about job security.

And those firmware engineering positions. No one has even bothered to apply. We haven’t even gotten to the salary negotiation stages, because I am sure if there was a viable candidate, Wed probably cut a pretty large package.

As far as lateral move svelte, plenty of people do it. I just did. No pay increase
.maybe even a slight pay cut.

[Coronita]

[quote=deadzone]On the one hand, we have all these threads about how hard it is for kids with excellent grades to even get accepted to public schools in California (in any degree let along Engineering). Then on the other hand we have these H1B proponents that claim there are not enough US citizens with STEM degrees.

It just doesn’t add up unless you are suggesting that the reason it is so hard to get accepted by UC schools is due to foreign competition. Perhaps that is true for UC schools(although I highly doubt it), this is definitely not the case nationally.

Let’s look at actual data from ASEE for the 2010/11 school year.
http://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/college-profiles/2011-profile-engineering-statistics.pdf

According to this report, 83,000 Bachelors degrees were awarded in Engineering with 93% of those to US permanent residents (i.e. not H1B material). For masters degrees, 47,000 were awarded with 57% of those to permanent residents. For PhDs, 9500 with 46% going to permanent residents.

So not surprisingly, there is more foreign influence in the graduate programs compared to undergrad. However, overall looking at these statistics, how can you see a shortage of domestic engineers?[/quote]

Well, there could be many factors….I’ll just use myself as an example. Out of my graduating class back in the mid 90ies when we were just coming out of a recession,

1) some chose to be civil, mechanical, material science, operations research/industrial chemical engineers, who lacked the knowledge/skills then to get hired by motorola, nortel, lucent, scrappy small company qualcomm that were looking for people that had studied digital signal processing, communication systems, information theory and stochastic processes, computer networking. My Qualcomm onsite interview, I had to do a Fourier Transform problem on the whiteboard, and a “Random Walk” problem, despite neither of the two questions ended up being anywhere relevant to what they hired me to do in the system’s group.

2) some were civil,mechanical, material science, ORIE, chemical, electrical engineers, that lacked the knowledge/skills of software engineering, OOP, real time O/S, unix network programming, relational database, to get hired by Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Netscape, Spyglass, AOL, Yahoo. I was one of them that graduated from school with virtually no software knowledge and not a single software company was interested in talking to me.

3) some were civil,mechanical, material science, ORIE, chemical, electrical engineers, that lacked the knowledge/skills of hardware engineering to get hired by Intel, Sun Microsystems, AMD, HP…. I was one of them that none of the top chip companies wanted to talk to me with the exception of HP, which then gave me an interview that I totally sucked wind on (good thing I never went there)

4)There were many top engineering graduates ended up going to work for McKinsey and Company, Bain and Company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG-Qualcomm’s advisor BTW), Mercer, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan…Some as traders.

5)There were many top engineering graduates that figured they wanted to go to medical school. Not me…

6)There were many top engineering graduates that figured they wanted to stay in academia….Definitely not me…
.
7)And there were plenty of graduates that barely graduated that probably would have been better off majoring in something else, because their academic performance was so bad in engineering, they couldn’t find any jobs.

———

Out of all the people that applied to Qualcomm, there were only 2 of us that got in from my school with a Bachelor’s degree, and 5 of us that got in with a Master’s.

*One BS/CS got in but decided to go work for Yahoo!. He was a US citizen

*I was the single BS/EE that got into the system’s group, and I only went after getting rejected by all the wall street companies I applied for. I was a US citizen

Out of the 5 masters

*3 were MS/EE with an emphasis in communication theory/wireless systems (all H1-B)

*1 was a MS/CS with an emphasis in operating systems (US citizen)

*1 was a MS/EE with a BS/CS elsewhere with an emphasis in computer networks (H1-B)

There were some PHD hires, I think all of them were all H1-B.

I remember when people were picking engineering specialization, many of the classmates ended up deciding NOT to go the EE route, and definitely not the wireless communication route because they felt it was too much math/too much probability, too much tedious theory….And the ones that were really good at math figured out that same math applied to developing Goldman Sach’s trading platform was a lot more lucrative than going to work for a company like Motorola or Qualcomm (well, at least before we learned about stock options).

I can think of a lot of mechanical engineers that were jobless after they graduated, and I didn’t understand why they picked that major despite everything telling them getting a job was hard to find.

And if I solely counted on what I only learned in school to get me a job, I wouldn’t have been able to move around to all the other companies I’ve worked at after Qualcomm, because I didn’t learn anything in college wrto software engineering.

[Coronita]

Also look at the most recent college graduates that we tried to hire… Many of the bachelors we interviewed didn’t really know about real time O/S, didn’t really have that much experience with mobile software…And the ones that we felt were bright and we could train, they weren’t interesting in working for us because they thought wireless connectivity was “boring”. They all wanted to go work for Facebook.

And as another example. My company has 4 open recs right now for senior firmware engineers. Pretty good pay…You could definitely negotiate a very nice salary and total comp package since these positions have been open for a long time now. I think I might have even posted them here awhile ago. Not a single one of the people I reached out to replied. Why? How many of you with an “engineer” title can write firmware? I know I can’t. A lot of these H1-B’s are hired because they have learned/done what many of the rest of us had snubbed our noses at doing throughout our career. And frankly, they are better at doing it then those of us who haven’t done it that now suddenly want to do it

[Coronita]

[quote=svelte]Let’s break it down using guesstimates…

QCOM has 33K employees, 15K of which are in San Diego…50%

If the layoffs occur in the same ratio, that means 2.5k of the 5K will come out of San Diego.

Out of those, say a third live in high cost areas along the coast, such as Carmel Valley.

The two-thirds not in high cost areas (1600 folks) will likely not be forced to sell due to working spouses, 401Ks, reserves, etc that can probably meet the lower mortgage. Of course some of those families will choose to move to other areas of the country, but they likely won’t be forced into selling at fire sale prices.

The one-third (800) that live in high cost coastal areas may be at risk. Say a quarter to half of those are forced to sell. That’s 200-400 more homes on the market over the next year…20 to 30 a month.

Will it affect housing prices? Probably. Will it crash housing prices? No.[/quote]

There’s another angle to this that I hate to say..But…The other angle to this is out of the layoffs, how much of these layoffs are disproportionately going to be the grunt worker bees engineers versus say Directors and VPs, that tend to live in the higher cost areas? There are a lot of Directors and VPs that have very little number of reports at that company. But at the same time, they probably are much better connected to the execs than your run of the mill grunt enginerd. If this layoff happens like most traditional layoffs at other companies, the management team manage to screw over the grunts while saving themselves.

And even if an director vp is impacted, I’m pretty sure they get a much nicer severance (early retirement) package than your average worker bee enginerd.

For example, when Sanjay when to Motorola, some of his favtorite VPs were pushed out by the new leaders. I believe some of them were forced to retire. However, those VPs still live where they lived in Del Mar and CV, the last time I visited friends that live next to them. My own neighbor was pushed out of Motorola when Google took over. He’s doing just fine as well, not working for a few months…

there will be some churn by some folks, nevertheless. Not convinced it will be earth shattering…

[Coronita]

[quote=deadzone]

Not sure how your response relates to my point that the idea (propaganda) that there are not enough US engineering grads is bullshit. 200K salary for engineer? Yes that is extraordinarily high, I pointed out that majority of engineers don’t make anywhere near that. Who thinks that is low? If I made 200K salary, I could afford to buy a house in ANY neighborhood in San Diego.

[/quote]

If you believe that the reason for H1-B’s exist because solely to exploit having cheap labor, then you’ll agree that H1-B staff engineers that pull in $200k/year are “cheap” and stealing job opportunities away from you that you would be able to apply for. Afterall, if that weren’t the case, why would the company being paying an H1-B staff engineer close to $200k if they were really trying to exploit H1-B’s cheaper cost. Is there some H1-B abuse, yes absolutely. Is it rampant everywhere, nope. Are there skill shortages in some skills, absolutely. If you’re an java J2EE developer, is there a skills shortage? Absolutely not.

[quote]
What’s up with the Patriot rant? Sounds like you’ve been watching to much Fox news. I pointed out that immigrants by and large come here for our money and consumerism, that is an obvious fact. My personal patriotism for the U.S. is irrelevant to this discussion.[/quote]

I never watch fox news… You were the one that went on the rant about

[quote]By the way, of course these immigrants are coming to work here for their own benefit, not for any “love” of US[/quote]

How much of the US do you “love” that isn’t tied to your own benefit? I’m just merely pointing out the hypocrisy of apparently this viewpoint that immigrant seem to need to come here for something “of love this country beyond for personal gain”. How many people here are motivated to do something only for the “love of this country” and not personal gain?

[Author]

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