I was laid off from Q a while ago. Quite a few things have happened since then. I found another job, in a remarkably similar business, and had some time to reflect.
One thing strikes me as particularly peculiar.
At Qualcomm, you could literally spend days without encountering an American-born engineer. Most of the people around me were from India, some from China, and others from various Asian countries.
I was repeatedly told why this was supposedly inevitable. Americans don't study hard enough. They don't pursue STEM careers. They lack discipline, technical competence, work ethic, and so forth. Vivek Ramaswamy was particularly eloquent in explaining all this.
I was also told, in no uncertain terms, that entire groups within Q would never hire a non-Indian engineer. The explanation was fascinating: American engineers supposedly wouldn't put up with certain management practices (hello Murthy), while employees dependent on their employers for immigration status would be much more accommodating.
Go figure.
Fast-forward to my new employer.
Similar industry. Similar technical complexity. Serious engineering challenges.
Except the overwhelming majority of engineers I encounter are American-born. There are some Indian engineers, of course, but nowhere near the proportions I saw at Q.
And guess what? The engineering gets done. Apparently, Americans can still do mathematics, write software, design complex systems, and solve difficult problems.
Perhaps Mr. Ramaswamy's explanation wasn't quite as brilliant as you imagined and quietly approved.
This experience has made me seriously suspect that what I witnessed at Qualcomm was not simply a shortage of qualified American engineers, but something considerably less flattering: hiring practices shaped by ethnic networks, favoritism, and managerial convenience.
I cannot overstate how widespread this was. I am also confident those same networks influenced who was protected during layoffs and who was expendable.
And here is the part worth reflecting on, particularly for those who participated in or benefited from such arrangements.
You may have convinced yourselves that you were practicing some form of Indian exceptionalism. That your networks were stronger, your people more capable, your management methods more effective, and that excluding outsiders was simply good business.
But a company is not an ethnic clubhouse. It exists in a competitive market.
When hiring becomes an exercise in loyalty and conformity rather than competence, the consequences eventually reach everyone—including those who thought the arrangement worked in their favor.
I have observed something else at Q. There was no shortage of people who could execute an established process, navigate corporate politics, manage upward, and keep the machinery running smoothly. Some were remarkably accomplished at it. (Hello again, Murthy.)
Give such an organization a well-defined problem and an established algorithm, and it can produce millions of lines of code implementing variations of bubble sort. Namaste.
But technological leadership demands something fundamentally different. It requires people willing to question the algorithm itself, challenge conventional wisdom, and occasionally invent an entirely new way of solving the problem.
There is a world of difference between implementing a Viterbi decoder and having the insight to recognize that a seemingly intractable problem can be transformed into a tractable trellis-based optimization.
And that brings me to Qualcomm's present difficulties.
Look at Qualcomm's stock performance. Compare it with the semiconductor industry. Even Intel, for years the laughingstock of Silicon Valley, has outperformed Q dramatically.
Of course, there are many ingredients in Qualcomm's troubles: strategic missteps, market dynamics, competition, and management decisions. I am not suggesting that ethnic favoritism explains all of them, or even most of them.
But I cannot help wondering whether they are related. After all, a corporate culture that rewards ethnic loyalty, conformity, and obedience over competence and independent judgment is hardly a recipe for technological leadership.
You cannot manage your way into a breakthrough that nobody is willing to imagine.
And now another round of layoffs.
For anyone who helped build or sustain those closed networks, perhaps this is a useful moment for reflection.
You may succeed in excluding your competition from the hiring process. You cannot exclude your competition from the marketplace.
American capitalism has a peculiar way of teaching that lesson.
And sometimes those who thought they were the beneficiaries of a system discover that they are among its casualties.