Some serious non-sense meetings. I don’t think I have seen as much time wasting and mud slinging meeting as the ones that Qualcomm have. 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 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 list and action items. Most meeting last 30 mins 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 mud slinging shouting matches that occur when some features break. One time we had frequent crash 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 purportedly 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 an 3rd party agreements (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 straight waterfall (dev -> test -> integration -> release). Even with a lengthy schedule, software often ship with major undiscovered bugs. I used to snigger at the term “feature complete release;” because it might as well mean crash 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 learn 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 use 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 credit), 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 long period of time often don’t get you the advancement. Fixing software bugs and pushing out new releases from 9AM to 9PM 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.
