It's as simple as that. When you treat the software engineers POORLY, don't expect the digital hardware to be around for very long. This was as true 30 years ago as it is today, but there is a huge glass ceiling for software engineers at Qualcomm and management is about to be taught a lesson which they failed badly to learn, in graduate school.
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Q is NOT a SW company. Q is NOT a HW company. Q is one big S&M reach around company.
Most of the cost incurred in a project is on SW and SW teams. What do you expect more? Moreover, I have seen many dumb SW engineers expecting each and every line of code and sequence to be documented and reviewed by HW team indicating that HW team even writes codes for them. I have a colleague who is CPU expert and even writes SW codes for the so called SW engineers. There are only few SW folks who are worth as 'SW engineers' in QCOM. Specially, QIPL Hyderabad folks just waste lot of money traveling and staying in SD with wives on project work which is not at all needed. Sheer waste of money and resources. No doubt the chopping is more in SW depts.
Bad treatment is indirectly linked to lack of tech jobs in SD. There is no incentive to treating employees better if there are no real alternatives to work for.
Also most QC engineers are very conservative and do not do anything but work and raise children.
now working great...not "not working great"
It's a hardware company. What do you expect? Why do you think there was a mass exodus to Google from the Android teams. Android for example is saturated, there's no need for OEM chip companies to come up with their own flavor of software. What comes out of AOSP is not working great, and is more or less hardware agnostic. This problem is not specific to Qualcomm, but every other company is the same way. Broadcom and Intel included. You were a valuable software engineer on mobile platforms to chip companies when none of the groudwork was there. But most of the groundwork is done now and the rest is mostly being written internally by Google, so there's really no need for each chip company to try to differentiate on the software as much. This is nothing more than evolution of the software and who holds the cards.
If you work at Google ,hardware is a commodity that no one gives a crap about.
Q is a hardware company at heart. Software is seen as a necessary evil; it costs a ton of money that we don't know how to charge for.
No 158022: There are software engineers who are capable of creating original works, AND who also do porting. Qualcomm has hired several. I was one of them, so I think I have a better idea of what goes on in the creativity department. The sad fact is that unless you are "fortunate" enough to be chosen for someone's pet R&D project--which may or may not have much future utility, or are one of your Dir.'s "favorites," you invariably get stuck doing integration--or worse, testing, in many cases using tools that are not really adequate for the job to begin with. Or in my case, explaining certain technical Patent and licensing issues to legal--because I learned a lot about that on my own at previous start-ups. Compared to managers and many of the Sr. Engineers/Sr. Staff engineers in the "drone" departments, we are grossly underpaid. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that my salary when I left QCOM this year was lower when I left, after being adjusted for inflation, than it was when I joined the company a few years ago.
Today software engineers, due to outsourcing, H-1B program, etc.. are just another commodity, and can be replaced quite easily; maybe that is the reason of poor treatment as referred.