Intel Corporation Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Dec 2011 in Santa Clara, CA (took a day)

This was an on-site interview for a 6-month contract position. My resume had been forwarded by a recruiter. Although a contract position was not my primary objective, I wanted to get more practice interviewing and to see if the interviewing/hiring process for a temporary position would be different. The hiring manager came to fetch me in the lobby and apparently expected someone different as he had to ask the person at reception to point me out. We went to a small interview room, where he started asking me about my experience while reviewing my resume on his laptop. He soon cut me short to try to find group members to interview me, who arrived after a few minutes, upon which the hiring manager left. One of the two interviewers started with questions to determine better which level of the software stack I had been programming at, asked me for a block diagram, asked me to describe some of the APIs exported by the system I had worked with, etc. The interviewer tended to change the question midway through my answer, and this went on and on. He seemed impatient with the pace of my answers. The other engineer was reading from her laptop (my resume? her email?). After some minutes of being bombarded with questions without being able to answer any of them to completion, I paused and said maybe we should stop the interview. At that point, the questioner backed off a bit and his companion took over. We did some white board programming. They answered the few questions I had and left, whereupon the hiring manager returned and gave me a final white-board programming problem. Soon he was done and escorted me back to the entrance. The white-board programming questions were not too bad, but overall the experience was dreadful because of the way I was bombarded with questions by the one interviewer. Besides that, they were visibly not interested in me as a candidate. In my opinion they conveyed a terrible impression of the company. Furthermore, the layout of the building was unappealing: white walls, narrow hallways, small rooms. A nightmare that left me feeling trashed afterwards for the rest of the day.