Qualcomm

• Casual culture and flexible working hours.
• Some very smart colleagues.
• Leader in wireless chipset business.
• You will learn a lot about the product and how to tackle some complex challenges.

Experience depends a lot on what group you are in and how well the work is aligned with your interests. It is very easy to become pigeonholed into working solely on an obscure feature, such as some module of a particular chipset that does X.

Effort over results: Promotion is largely based on how long you have been at Qualcomm, not necessarily your effectiveness as an engineer. There is also the pressure to show that you have been working hard by sending useless email updates at late hours.

Very process-oriented: On an email thread with a technical issue, a common tactic is to incrementally CC higher-ranked engineers/managers to passive-aggressively attempt to expedite progress. What starts as an email exchange about an issue reported by a customer rapidly turns into a 50-email long thread with at least 2 VP-level engineers, 5 senior staff, 10 senior engineers, etc. Too many meetings.

Large duplication of effort: There are a lot of similar projects between different divisions, such as QCT and Corporate R&D.

Relatively low salary: HR needs to offer more compelling reasons to stay at Qualcomm other than the San Diego beach lifestyle.

Encourage more effective means of solving technical problems other than assigning more manpower to the problem at hand. Hire competent engineers, not obedient engineers.