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"Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers" But seriously, Qualcomm is the worst company ever to work with (except maybe Oracle). They are like a gorilla - t

by umvi 7y ago

"Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers" But seriously, Qualcomm is the worst company ever to work with (except maybe Oracle). They are like a gorilla - they won't budge no matter how hard you push. Every little thing costs licensing money - from documents to tooling. We have a Qualcomm SoC for my current project, and support is abysmal. They put in a minimal effort to provide support and only after you've completed the onerous requirements to submit a support ticket. It involves retrieving tons of dumps and logs and such using their various Q-tools (which are very buggy and half-baked; many of them cost $25k+/year to license). Most of the time they'll just shrug and say "works on our setup" and refuse to help. We'll spend hundreds of man-hours debugging their crap until we find the issue in their kernel driver and then they won't even acknowledge it was a problem and will say "qmi_wwan is an open source driver. We do not support it." Right, so you expect everyone else to maintain and fix the bugs in qmi_wwan even though virtually ALL of your customers use it and you yourselves rely on it as a critical piece of your development platform. Good one, Qualcomm.

Scoundreller 7y ago
Do you ever point out some terrible design decision and they reply “working as designed” and then do nothing?
- umvi 7y ago
  The thing is - their software quality is very poor from what I've seen. 1000-line switch-statements with tons of DRY violations, that kind of thing. But they are really good at testing. They will make darn sure their software works under their extremely narrow and fragile definition of a test platform. If you deviate from their test platform at all, you can kiss support goodbye. "Oh, you are using Linux 4.X to talk to our chip? Nope, no support, we specified Linux 3.19 in the test setup, you are on your own." What sucks is that our platform involves a lot of different vendors - a Marvell SoC, a Qualcomm SoC, etc. All the other vendors will work with you. But with Qualcomm it's their way or the highway. They know they can get away with that behavior.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    Its still such a shame that a company as belligerent and unfriendly as Qualcomm bought out the best, most forthcomming and friendly WIFI vendor, Atheros. Predictably, months after the acquisition, all atheros documentation initiatives were killed, and their new generation of chipset requires a gigantic closed source blob that barely functions, with an absolute minimum of functionality (you cant even change the MAC address!)
- xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
  No? This is a terrible response. "This is a terrible design decision, we should revisit it."
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    I meant the vendor is too dense to understand that it's a problem when it's working according to their shitty design. Like ordering a parachute, and the vendor ships you a concrete contraption. And when you call in, they seem incapable of understanding how there could be a problem because it's within their specifications.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  Do you ever point out some terrible design decision and they reply “working as designed” and then do nothing? I'm getting some FTDI vibes here.
tooltalk 7y ago
> "Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers" I think you are talking about Rambus, not Qualcomm. >They put in a minimal effort to provide support and only after you've completed the onerous requirements to ... Don't you have to sign a BCPA or something along that line to get full support? Apple had full access to source code -- which then Apple turned it over to Intel, QCOM alleged -- and also demanded that QCOM update their hardware and drivers at least once a year.
- umvi 7y ago
  > Don't you have to sign a BCPA or something along that line to get full support? Probably. I work for a much smaller company than Apple so no doubt we are doing everything we can to prevent Qualcomm from sucking up the entire project budget. I don't know the exact details but I'd bet we have the lowest tier support plan available.
AceJohnny2 7y ago
> "Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers" I thought Oracle was the premier example of that :) http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts > But seriously, Qualcomm is the worst company ever to work with (except maybe Oracle). OK, we're on the same page ;)
not_real_acct 7y ago
> They put in a minimal effort to provide support and only after you've completed the onerous requirements to submit a support ticket. Tech jobs in San Diego pay terrible, but Qualcomm is something else. There's a Chili's a block away from Qualcomm, on Mira Mesa Blvd, and I think you could make more money waiting tables there. No joke, I've had recruiters hit me up for jobs at Qualcomm that paid about 50% more than minimum wage and required a college degree and five years of experience.
- praneshp 7y ago
  > and I think you could make more money waiting tables there. I was only an intern there, but I'm 100% sure you are blabbering.
- skwb 7y ago
  > Tech jobs in San Diego pay terrible Is this commensurate with cost of living? I know SF pays more in real dollars, but cost of living in bay is also much higher than SD.
- tooltalk 7y ago
  were they QA positions?
fx1994 7y ago
Yes, and unfortunately they bought Atheros :(

by umvi 7y ago

Scoundreller 7y ago

Do you ever point out some terrible design decision and they reply “working as designed” and then do nothing?

umvi 7y ago
The thing is - their software quality is very poor from what I've seen. 1000-line switch-statements with tons of DRY violations, that kind of thing. But they are really good at testing. They will make darn sure their software works under their extremely narrow and fragile definition of a test platform. If you deviate from their test platform at all, you can kiss support goodbye. "Oh, you are using Linux 4.X to talk to our chip? Nope, no support, we specified Linux 3.19 in the test setup, you are on your own." What sucks is that our platform involves a lot of different vendors - a Marvell SoC, a Qualcomm SoC, etc. All the other vendors will work with you. But with Qualcomm it's their way or the highway. They know they can get away with that behavior.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  Its still such a shame that a company as belligerent and unfriendly as Qualcomm bought out the best, most forthcomming and friendly WIFI vendor, Atheros. Predictably, months after the acquisition, all atheros documentation initiatives were killed, and their new generation of chipset requires a gigantic closed source blob that barely functions, with an absolute minimum of functionality (you cant even change the MAC address!)
xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
No? This is a terrible response. "This is a terrible design decision, we should revisit it."
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  I meant the vendor is too dense to understand that it's a problem when it's working according to their shitty design. Like ordering a parachute, and the vendor ships you a concrete contraption. And when you call in, they seem incapable of understanding how there could be a problem because it's within their specifications.
HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
Do you ever point out some terrible design decision and they reply “working as designed” and then do nothing? I'm getting some FTDI vibes here.

tooltalk 7y ago

> "Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers" I think you are talking about Rambus, not Qualcomm. >They put in a minimal effort to provide support and only after you've completed the onerous requirements to ... Don't you have to sign a BCPA or something along that line to get full support? Apple had full access to source code -- which then Apple turned it over to Intel, QCOM alleged -- and also demanded that QCOM update their hardware and drivers at least once a year.

umvi 7y ago
> Don't you have to sign a BCPA or something along that line to get full support? Probably. I work for a much smaller company than Apple so no doubt we are doing everything we can to prevent Qualcomm from sucking up the entire project budget. I don't know the exact details but I'd bet we have the lowest tier support plan available.

AceJohnny2 7y ago

> "Qualcomm is a law firm with a few engineers" I thought Oracle was the premier example of that :) http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts > But seriously, Qualcomm is the worst company ever to work with (except maybe Oracle). OK, we're on the same page ;)

not_real_acct 7y ago

> They put in a minimal effort to provide support and only after you've completed the onerous requirements to submit a support ticket. Tech jobs in San Diego pay terrible, but Qualcomm is something else. There's a Chili's a block away from Qualcomm, on Mira Mesa Blvd, and I think you could make more money waiting tables there. No joke, I've had recruiters hit me up for jobs at Qualcomm that paid about 50% more than minimum wage and required a college degree and five years of experience.

praneshp 7y ago
> and I think you could make more money waiting tables there. I was only an intern there, but I'm 100% sure you are blabbering.
skwb 7y ago
> Tech jobs in San Diego pay terrible Is this commensurate with cost of living? I know SF pays more in real dollars, but cost of living in bay is also much higher than SD.
tooltalk 7y ago
were they QA positions?

fx1994 7y ago

Yes, and unfortunately they bought Atheros :(