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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jon Koplik who wrote (30066)	5/16/1999 11:26:00 AM
From: CDMQ	Respond to of 152472

mp heads are unnecessary): Carol Solinger STAFF WRITER May 16, 1999 s boss said her job was secure. In fact, on the eve before the ax fell, her boss advised her to work from home on Tuesday, Feb. 2. "It will be a bloodbath," she recalls him saying. That morning, as Solinger was typing at her laptop computer in her bedroom, a secretary phoned and told Solinger she was needed at the office. Solinger' s supervisor -- a confidant who used to share secrets with her -- called her into his office. His voice was cold, mechanical. She stopped at the door when she saw the person from human resources and forced a joke. "I don' t know if I want to come in here." she said. Solinger got the boot -- after nearly five years as a global market forecaster for Qualcomm' s infrastructure business and later as business manager covering markets in Ethiopia, Mauritius, Egypt and Israel. She left in tears, but at least a guard didn' t escort her to her car, as happened to many others. "I was very surprised and upset," she says. "I resented being put in that position. You feel like you' re falling. It was like a divorce." The sting didn' t end there. Of all the colleagues the 47-year-old Solinger counted as friends, only one -- a secretary -- called in the weeks after Qualcomm' s payroll bloodletting. The secretary invited Solinger to lunch with some regulars still with the company, but Solinger felt out of place when they talked shop and discussed the dip in morale at Qualcomm. "It just threw salt in the wound," she says. The day of the layoffs, Solinger and the other castoffs were given two options: Sign an agreement not to sue the company and get a hefty severence package, along with access to job-hunting services through Drake Beam Morin in San Diego. Fail to sign by the end of the week and get much less severance pay and no access to company-paid outplacement services. Solinger and all but one or two of the ex-employees took the better deal. The first week, DBM set up job-transition seminars -- a sort of a post-traumatic shock triage -- at National University in Mission Valley, where, ironically, Solinger sometimes teaches research and marketing courses. The next week, DBM moved the center, complete with Internet-access computers, to empty office space at Qualcomm. Solinger attended one of DBM' s courses on how to mask age, offering such tips as deleting dates from a resume and dyeing hair to hide the grey. "It was a little eerie walking into a Qualcomm building to look for a job," Solinger says. Anger fueled her search. She hunted, networked and researched prospective companies daily from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. "It really was a race against your peers," she says. She crossed the finish line in mid-March, landing a job as director of marketing for Myron L Co. in Carlsbad, which makes instruments that test water quality. "I needed to get away from telecom after what happened to me," Solinger says. "Now, I' m having a ball." Copyright 1999 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.