Palm Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated Aug 24, 2011 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 12 ratings 
“Average” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 12 ratings
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| 1–10 of 12 Palm Interviews | Sort by |
Software Manager at Palm
Posted Aug 24, 2011
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2.0
Easy Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jul 2011 (took 4 weeks)
Most interviews in tech companies nowadays are ill designed by hot-headed coders - or not designed at all. Palm is actually better than most. At least they don't try to quiz you on sorting algorithms (or cryptographic hashing algorithms for a security job). They actually focused on the key factors that can make this job successful: experiences in dealing with security breach episodes, and ability to interact with other players in the organization. But in the end, they fell for it nevertheless - they asked about how certain Unix shell commands are implemented - this is what I call the "freshness of memory" questions. If you were someone happens to be working on that piece of code daily, you'd appear a genius. I told them I used to know when I was a Linux kernel developer years ago, or how I might approach it. But that's not good enough. With HP probably closing shop on WebOS, I won't mind too much.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
QA Engineer at Palm
Posted Jul 1, 2011
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Jun 2011 in Sunnyvale, CA (took 4+ weeks)
I applied online. The recruiter from Palm emailed me to setup a phone interview with hiring manager. I got invited to an on-site interview one week later. The interview panel consists of 6 people, mostly QA and Dev. Total time is about 5 hours.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
More Palm QA Engineer Interviews
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
QA Engineer at Palm
Posted Mar 24, 2011
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Declined Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2011 in Sunnyvale, CA (took 1 week)
The manager was very friendly , the position was pretty demanding . They needed someone who could work late evenings and weekends sometimes. The position was interesting though .
Interview Questions
Reason for Declining
Due to work hours
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Group/Panel Interview.
More Palm QA Engineer Interviews
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Firmware Engineer at Palm
Posted Dec 13, 2010 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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2.0
Easy Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Sep 2010 (took a day)
Interview from linked in. Manager had half an hour tech interview.
Asked questions about stack growing direction, local and global static variables, sorting, bit manipulation.
Interviewer was professional and friendly. Also tried to test knowledge on linux shell programming. I did not hear back from them as I was not able to answer linux related questions.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at Palm
Posted Oct 15, 2010
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2.0
Easy Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2010 in Sunnyvale, CA (took 1+ week)
The interview was phone screen only. Went through the usual stuff first and then a technical question. Has some difficulties getting a grasp of the interviewer intention of the question. Question is quite simple.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
More Palm Senior Software Engineer Interviews
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
View Comments (1)
Inappropriate?
Kernel Engineer at Palm
Posted Sep 17, 2010 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Aug 2010 in Sunnyvale, CA (took a day)
I was interviewed by a very young team(all with similar names and all from a particular place in the world) .
Questions asked for kernel position:
- Write a FIFO
- Write memcpy
- Write a sub routine for the game GO
- Linked list questions
Does that look like kernel related questions?
I screwed up on FIFO and the GO game. The downfall could be because of that but I would never know.
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at Palm
Posted Aug 23, 2010
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2.0
Easy Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2010 (took a day)
The interview process is straight forward. Interview question included:
1. technical details of various tools such as java, Spring, hibernate, MySQL and others
2. design of multi-tier architecture
3. database optimization, rdbms concepts, normal forms, ACID, etc.
4. a simple coding test
5. question on scalability
6. describe past work experience
I think the future prospect of Palm is poor. The current mobile environment reminds me of the PC environment in the 1980s. At the time there were IBM PC compatible, Apple, and a slew of lesser players such as Commodore, Amiga, Atari, etc. All the little guys disappeared and Apple went through a near death experience. The biggest winner is MS because the PC is a open platform that DOS and Windows ran on. As such, MS was able to piggyback off the aggregate marketing muscle and technology innovation of the entire PC compatible industry. Today, Google is looking to repeat the MS strategy.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.
More Palm Senior Software Engineer Interviews
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at Palm
Posted Jun 24, 2010
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5.0
Very Difficult Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jun 2010 in Sunnyvale, CA (took 2 weeks)
An external recruiter called me up about this position. It seemed pretty interesting. Talked with the hiring manager on the phone screen and hit it off with him.
My on-site interview was the "gauntlet" type: 6 people. 1 Senior Director, 1 Architect, 2 Managers, and 2 underlings to give me coding questions. It was also split over two days (since I am gainfully employed!)
First day: Went pretty well, although I found out they had a copy of my resume with omitted my work experience at Apple...whoops! Talking to the director was a little difficult, since he was probing me on stuff I did at Apple, and forcing me to dredge up stuff I barely remembered. Oh well.
Second day: That's when they decided to haul out their heavy hitters. It didn't go so well.
First guy: an underling tests me by asking how to make a stack behave like a Queue. I gave the boiler plate answer. He then says how to make it better, to balance out the work done by the enqueue and dequeue operations. Got that too. Then he asks me a tree traversal algorithm. Got that.
Second guy: was supposed to be the hiring mgr, but he decided to take a ME day. Kinda poor form to skip out on me like that, IMO, but whatever. The replacement was another mgr, who worked in their applications group. Very good technically. I made the mistake of admitting my general disdain for the "const" attribute, and decided to exploit that like a sore wound. He also asks me to implement memcpy(). I resisted that too, knowing that's a question full of traps. He finally left, quite quickly, and without shaking my hand. I probably should have left right then.
Third guy: their Architect. First question he asks me: "Why Palm?" I don't think I gave the rah-rah answer he was hoping for. He then goes into C++, specifically: "how would I implement a smart pointer?". Thing is, I've seen that implemented in a prior company, and it SUCKED! I relayed my experience to the guy, and said I would rather use the Boost implementation of SP's.
He insisted I write something down, saying he'd like to see how I think. I kinda knew my goose was cooked, and should have said: "here's how I think: I'm a practical programmer, who prefers to use a solution that will work, and doing SP's is not motivating me". Things got frosty real quick between the guy and I...he then asks if I knew what a "Decorator" pattern is. I just said nope, quite flatly.
I asked a couple questions, and was escorted out, with a curt thank you.
During the interview, they kept bitching that they need help..well, they certainly didn't need mine, with the questions they were throwing at me, and choosing to chase me away.
S'ok, I still won't get one of their Pre phones...whatever lol
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
More Palm Senior Software Engineer Interviews
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at Palm
Posted May 4, 2010
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Aug 2008 in Sunnyvale, CA (took 4+ weeks)
recruiter contacted. I took some time to reply. They did 2 over the phone interviews. Flew me in for face to face. It went on for all day. I was offered in next 2-3 days.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Group/Panel Interview, a Skills Test, a Drug Test and a Background Check.
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Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Product Manager at Palm
Posted Oct 19, 2009
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed May 2008 in Sunnyvale, CA (took 8 weeks)
2 phone interviews (each about 45 minutes) and 2 half-days face-to-face interviews (each about 5-6 hours).
Phone interviews: first one with a recruiter, the second one with the hiring manager.
Face-to-face interviews with future colleagues in related positions.
Interviews mainly focused on previous experience and relevant market/industry knowledge.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Background Check.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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