Thread regarding Qualcomm Inc. layoffs

My advice is to focus on what you do best and try to fill a niche that's highly compensated. If you can manage to become a project lead and stay in that position, you can enjoy a long well-paid tenure in a low-demand position where you don't actually have to do anything. Come in late, leave early, but pay close attention to detail on you status reports. How are your font selection skills? Try to start using animated transitions in you owed point presentations. Log in from home (or the bar) and check email during the evening. Keep your laptop next to the bed and check email immediately upon waking. Then you can boink the hooker once or twice more before sending her on her way, and maybe get in a couple of miles running before you check email once more and shower before heading into the office for the 10:00am meeting. Go to lunch at 11:30 for 1.5-2 hours, send some email, go to some meetings, encourage the engineers working 12 hour days to continue to push, and be sure to send your status updates. If you're aggressive (i.e. upper management material) you can get the engineers to spend an extra half hour on formatting the status they send you after the 12 hour day. That way you can get to the bar a little earlier.

The qcom learning center used to give out free company accounts to Pluralsight.com. Not sure if they still do that anymore - check with the learning center. I still have a company account with them because they never took mine away after I left a few years ago.

@Anon Ymous:

if you learned all that on your own you're way ahead of the curve and should never worry about not having a job. Most engineers (HW or SW) stick to their little niche and don't know much outside it..

Take the UCSD extension Embedded Programming course

I am in the same boat with you in a way. I started as HW frontend designer (Synopsys and all that nonsense that makes one feel like a NAND gate) that and moved to system architcture slowly, to understand HW-SW interaction. I have been learning and doing SW projects in my little free time all along, under the assumption that HW engineering is a well paid niche, that is shrinking, and because I somehow thought SW would have been a better path. But the pay is too sweet, while will last... To full disclosure, I love SW and I am not sure I would have done this just because I was told is a good idea. And, I have more ideas than I can possibly work on (shifting to think more from business rather engineering perspective). My goal was to understand the full stack from HW to the Cloud from a practical perspective (create something clean that works). As pieces of the puzzle I learned Arduino, sensors and connectivity (spi, i2c, etc), and built a couple of robots and working now on a IoT appliance (cloud connected toy). I wrote a small cooperarive OS for the boards (nothing fancy) and can articulate task scheduling, preemption, priority etc. I learned Android programming, and used the latest UI frameworks, and buit everything from UI to the USB and BLE interfacing with Arduino. I am learning Firebase real time cloud usage for IoT now. I also built one app/framework for Android + Google cloud to create a market place on top of google maps that I will launch as startup if things get really shaky here. I have a similar app in the pipe for automotive industry (both have reasonable business models, with relatively low capital investment risk - salary of 3/4 engineers over 1-2 years). Overall with the HW base, IoT basics, Mobile development and Cloud you should have a good generic foundation. Of course there is the Enterprise part that may be also worth knowing about. Every business will have a specific need and use different stacks, but what I found is that the fundamentals are the same, and as long as you are willing to learn you'll do fine. You can probably connect more dots than a pure SW engineer. I somehow belive that the future will require a mix of knowledge that was not required until now, and which is not taught in schools. Good luck.

Stanford's CS department through iTunes U has great video tutorials on learning SWIFT...iTunes App store books, Swift Programming v 2 Beta (just updated a couple of days ago) is also very good if you're getting into iOS development.

You appear to have a great attitude and good command of English. You'll be fine.

Decide whether you want to get into low-level systems and/or embedded programming or whether you want to go higher in the stack.

Personally I think the further you get away from hardware, the better off you are in the long run. Delve into C#, F#, JavaScript, Python and/or Ruby. If you're a visual learner, I highly recommend signing up for PluralSight - it will help introduce you to and scratch the surface of many modern (high level) technologies and languages. The next step will be up to you - to dig deeper. Set up a GitHub account and look to join any open project as a contributor. Read hacker news (news.ycombinator.com) religiously to see industry trends. Interacting with other SW engineers will be key in helping you learn - hacker news is where they rave and rant.

A book I highly recommend is "Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman". It's a small, light read but every page is valuable, great for the growing mind. Now with your HW background you have an edge amongst SW engineers in getting your foot in the door in IoT and embedded (medical) systems. I would try to ride the Skynet Drone Wave™ that coming upon us (against our will). Especially with San Diego being a DoD/military zone. Arduino (spelling?), Raspberry Pi, and other platforms that are traditionally scary for software engineers to get into - should be more welcoming to you. Should. Database, Data architecture is another beast for another post....