[er4hn]

I think this is valuable for those outside of Qualcomm to understand why they have the role that they do in the mobile space. Having worked there as well I have two observations:

- So much of that wall of patents was undergrad level CS concepts with ", for mobile device" tacked on the end. Paraphrasing, don't sue me (kidding..), but that was the gist of it.

- Their actual development process was pretty bad. I submitted a bug fix within the first few weeks I was there. Due to their CI process being entirely manual and very broken I was informed nearly a year later that my fix did not work. This tied in pretty well with my department being told they had a "budget"[1] of lines of code they could change and that budget being pretty limited.

Overall I left with an impression that they were mostly there to license very old technology and make money from patents. Maybe their hardware team was better, I couldn't say.

[1] Most of the effort of our team was spent debugging crash dumps determined to be in "our" part of the code. Nearly all of these were caused by other teams calling into an API we maintained with a null function pointer that "our" code would call. When I asked if we could refactor the API to return an error code if the function pointer was null I learned about the "code budget" and how it would cost too much to refactor.

[shuckles]

Really incredible stuff. Thank you for sharing. Reminds me to continue losing sleep at night over baseband software.

[senderista]

About a decade ago I had to help with due diligence on a potential acquirer in the San Diego area. Qualcomm was the largest tech employer there and from the developers I talked to they seemed to have a terrible reputation at least among software folks.

[acdha]

Around the turn of the century I was working for a web development company there and we had done clients Qualcomm was approaching for J2ME apps - the kind of stuff we take for granted now, but clearly potentially of interest. I took a look at their developer docs and it looked pretty gruesome – far behind even the 90s web on almost everything – but it was the only game in town for a lot of phones.

One of our sales guys was working with a now-famous brewery & they were interested in a mobile friendly store locator since they had far less distribution back then. I tossed together a basic PoC using a crude geolocation system which worked well enough and we were thinking it might be worth trying. A while later they started to respond to our questions on pricing – which started at $50k per carrier for the privilege of being offered for sale, plus over half of the sale price, and that was the floor: they wanted to see the corporate balance sheet so they could decide on an acceptable percentage of their TOTAL revenue, even if most of it had nothing to do with mobile sales. Everyone said “haha, no!”, and dropped it.