I made the simple mistake of running code thru some simple linters and things like valgrind/boundschecker/purify. Apparently not wanting my code to crash was some sort of political nightmare. I had to involve several higher level managers for anyone to care. The other groups got seriously mad at me for daring to look at their code. Learned my lesson. Do not do that, just fix their crap and dont say anything and work with your own branch of their borked stuff.. I even had the issue on my own team sometimes. People would 'take ownership' of something and you better not dare touch their code. It usually was not too hard to find the same mistake hundreds of times in a particular code base. As they made the mistake once they then copy and pasted it everywhere.

There are teams in qcom that 'get it'. There are also golden calf teams where you just do not even think about looking at their code.

It is not TLA's, it is built in kingdom problem systemic to the way qcom runs itself.

Yeah, it was one of the reasons I left. Because the chip is divided into many different processors, and broadly speaking the more area your processor takes the more your organization matters, there is this constant infighting for expanding the domain of your processor to capture an ever increasing piece of the pie.

This is of course an oversimplification. There are plenty of people just trying to build the best product they can and cooperating with other teams, but at the VP level and above it's a dog eats dog world.

At NVidia my role was much smaller, but what I saw was much more cooperative, and I think a big part of it is that the GPU is at the end of the day one giant chip that does everything and all the pieces work together like an orchestra. I even saw better communication between the software and hardware folks, which is always a challenge in the semiconductor industry.