Qualcomm Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details two onsite interviews plus three phone interviews, a little repetitive but it was good to get access to lots of different people to ask them questions. Had to speak with people in the US so those interviews were in the evening but that was fine. covered my general background, industry knowledge, most difficult hires, dealing with line managers,strengths, weaknesses

Interview Details Telephonic-->F2F--> HR

There was some mis-communication between HR and tech manager. She passed on the wrong profile. Manager just asked me what happens when mobile is turned on.

Interview Details Applied online, called on phone interview within 2 weeks. The phone interview was from my would be manager who said the interview would take 30 minutes. Instead, we talked for 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Two weks later I get notice from some person at Qualcomm to tell me I need to have two more phone interviews with people in SAN DIEGO. WTF? I mean the job is in the UK so why do tech people in San Diego need to talk to me?

Anyway, talk to people in San Diego. First person calls a bit late, interview runs 45 mins instead of the allotted 30, which makes me late for the next call, and the next interviewer huffily blames the lateness on me. Both San Diego interviews were technical but amounted to mostly me explaining how to multiply two fixed point numbers and minor uninteresting C specific type questions. Nothing is said about the actual job..

Invited to onsite interview in the UK.
The in person interview was very technical with details not very relevant to the position. They asked me again how to multiply floating point numbers. You'd think that they'd know how to look it up by now! Then they asked me "what's a Q15 representation?" all questions that were rather too specific and irrelevant to a comms DSP position. Then I got a written test, with questions involving deciphering what a piece of code was doing. The piece of code was computing x raised to the power n but it was programmed in a very weird, obfuscated, inneficient way involving taking modulo of n to determine whether n was odd or even, etc (lots of unnecessary steps) that made me worry that that was the way they actually wrote code at Qualcomm. They also asked me what is j raised to the power j and when I answered "It is sqrt(minus one) raised to the sqrt(minus one) " they didn't like the answer.

They did not describe to me what the job entailed, nor gave me time to ask questions or look much at the real work they were doing other than a very cursory, superficial "lab tour".

Two weeks later, they said "they wanted to move forward with the offer".

Then silence. Two weeks after that I wrote to ask what was going on. They claimed they wanted to discuss the offer by phone. I asked "what offer since you haven't sent me one". They were adamant on only discussing things verbally, nothing was ever written.

After a month I finally got an informal "offer" by email, detailing salary, but being nonspecific on other benefits including stock option price and vesting period and bonuses, thus giving me no real way to seriously evaluate the offer due to lack of details.

Reason for Declining – Compensation level was too low. Interviewers seemed too concerned with irrelevant, obscure details of implementation as opposed to big picture, important fundamentals and DSP and communications theory. Incompetent HR also made me wary of ever working there. But especially compensation offered was WAY too low for such a supposedly successful "top 100 companies to work for" company.

Interview Details After applying I received a reply in one week for on site interview.
Overall the interview was pretty much technical. Questions ranged from regarding university project till the actual communication theory. I will advise to study your communications related modules properly before the interview.
Also the background of the company is important but I think it depends on whom is interviewing. I was interviewed by only engineers and hence wasn't really asked as much house keeping questions as I would had normally been.

Interview Details 1st round HR interview : over phone. Basic questions on time management, priorities, college life etc
2nd round : Technical Phone interview, questions on C keywords (Static, volatile, const, typedef), questions on power optimization techniques, OS questions (deadlock, priority inversion, types of scheduling etc), and a coding question. (Write a function that counts the number of set bits in an integer number). Why is debugging memory leaks so difficult? How is it done?
ONSITE: 6 rounds on interview, 1 HR, 5 technical. whole day. Onsite questions follows

Negotiation Details – Salary is usually non-negotiable for starters, but they pay u more than enough...so you don't need to worry about that.

Interview Details On campus

2 technical 1 hr

Interview Details The whole interview process was divided into two part, First level was basic questions on projects, Brief project explanation. After he moved on to basic question on Pipelining, Caches,Forwarding, hazard detection and example of hazard. The Second interview was much more detailed on Level having OoO processing, Scheduling and bits of coding skills.

Interview Details Received the onsite interview request after the phone interview. The onsite process includes 6 rounds.

Technical interviewers were easy going, they would give you hints or lead you if you have no clue. Asked about hardware test related questions, include what to test, how to test, what could be reasons if result is not as expected. Require basic knowledge about circuit schematic diagram, wireless communication transceiver diagram, noise figure, link budget calculation, sensitivity, testing equipment (e.g. VNA, Spectrum analyzer, etc.), basic C++ or C#

HR interview was very nice, introduced the company and its benefits, very few behavior questions.

Interview Details hiring process was great. A total of 6 people interviewed each for a period of 45min to an hour.