Qualcomm

During my time, we used to have individual offices, but I hear that’s changing.

Great travel benefits while you travel for work; I heard that’s changing too.

Great health benefits: $0 deductible, $10 copay for doctor visits, and $10 for medication. I hear that’s changing starting 2016.

Pretty good pay, but if you work 60 to 80 hours, it isn’t worth that much.

Free gym; that’s still the same, yay!

Some serious nonsense meetings. I don’t think I have seen as much time wasting and mudslinging meeting as the ones that Qualcomm has. Decisions need to be “socialized” in a “democratic fashion.” I can feel my stomach tighten at these buzzwords. The managers were not big on taking responsibility, so it’s my responsibility to convince all participants. Sounds great in theory, but in practice, this just means you’ve got to do the hard work to convince more people, or one week later, you are sitting through another meeting talking about the same thing. I rarely see meetings produce to-do lists and action items. Most meetings last 30 minutes or an hour, even though they really could be shortened. I’ve seen level 3 engineers’ days being fully booked with meetings, and sometimes double booked, so they better do work during nights and weekends. But really, the worst part of meetings is the mudslinging shouting matches that occur when some features break. One time we had frequent crashes in a handset; it was traced to a watchdog condition. One of the conditions that might trigger it was a full heap. So we reasonably asked if the responsible parties could check memory leaks. I could swear someone was getting bloody murdered by the loud shouting and responsibility deflecting. Waste of time all around.

Stodgy, antiquated, monotonous software strategy! I worked in QIS (Qualcomm Internet Services), a supposedly web services division of the company. But there was much attitude against integrating emerging practices and technology. We even had a meeting back in 2013 from legal telling us not to participate in open source forums (not code contribution, but just Q/A forums), not to sign a 3rd party agreement (which effectively means not to download Android SDK, iOS SDK) without informing the legal department first. Of course, the bigger disappointment is that even when I was leaving, I hardly saw modern practices like continuous delivery, continuous integration, DevOps, continuous testing, etc., etc. Each handset software release takes weeks in a straight waterfall (dev -> test -> integration -> release). Even with a lengthy schedule, software often ships with major undiscovered bugs. I used to snigger at the term “feature complete release,” because it might as well mean crashing after 5 minutes. I feel senior employees at Qualcomm San Diego can really benefit a lot by taking an externship at lean startups and actually learning something about efficiency and process automation.

Duplication of efforts. Where do I begin on this one… There are often multiple internally developed or internally available tools for you to do the same thing, but good luck to you if you need help setting it up. To give you an example, I needed to do some integration testing with some QC partner corporations. One of the tasks is automated dialing and torture testing. Supposedly there were 3 tools available for me to use.

• One was developed by a separate QC division; and it was obviously meant to do some serious heavy lifting. I couldn’t use it because our liaison couldn’t get the help, and the customization effort to get it to look into LTE protocol instead of CDMA was high.
• Another tool was developed by an outside consulting firm; we couldn’t use it because it didn’t have the right driver.
• Yet another internally developed tool was not used for a reason or another I couldn’t remember.

So I had to write a script to do automated dialing. Just to think, 3 separate groups got credit for developing their tools (and got paid), then moved on, and never thought about supporting them again. Apparently my experience was not unique.

Slow pace of advancement. As a lot of people have mentioned before, doing hard work for a long period of time often doesn’t get you the advancement. Fixing software bugs and pushing out new releases from 9 AM to 9 PM day after day will maybe get you to the next level after 5 years. Majority of Qualcomm departments are not growing, so your advancement opportunity is limited. Much of the employees at Qualcomm are pretty young, so advancement through attrition is really not an option. When I was quitting, I was offered advancement to stay. This really doesn’t inspire loyalty.

Actually, instead of advice to management, I will give advice to would-be employees.

At Qualcomm, there's an endless amount of work to do. If you are a hard charger, you can fill out a 60-80 work hour week really quickly.

At lunch, you eat at the Qualcomm café; you go to the Qualcomm gym; swim at the large pool at the Jacobs Community Center; if you get sick, use the Qualcomm Health Center. Every few months, you will see your bosses 4 levels above ride off into retirement in their Tesla/BMW/Lexus.

It will be easy to lose yourself in this big Qualcomm "life" and think the big QC will take care of you from cradle to the grave. BUT IT'S NOT!

It's a slow slog fighting for advancement. Doing the normal work (fixing software bugs, churning out another modem software release, doing another release build) will elevate you very slowly. For a tech company, there really seems to be a sense that only your seniority matters in terms of advancement. That, and of course, your mastery of manipulating your own political perception.

Qualcomm is a business, just like anything else, which means profits above most things. While I get to hear some lovely mantras like “work-life balance” and “open door policy”; it’s almost not used at a practical level.

Read all the comments about work-life balance and see if anyone thinks you can balance your life and work in QC. The “open door policy” means you should be able to bring any concerns and issues to managers. The only time I hear people air out dirty laundry is when they are transferring or they are leaving. So go figure.

Don’t lose yourself in Qualcomm life; it’s incredibly easy to lose your sense of the outside world in the daily grind. Keep an ear to the outside world and see what’s interesting. Qualcomm has successfully milked 3G and 4G and related services. But the competitive landscape is also shifting; you have to decide where the puck is going to be and be there.