QUALCOMM Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated Jan 10, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 9 ratings 
“Difficult” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 9 ratings
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| 1–9 of 9 QUALCOMM Interviews | Sort by |
Senior Software Engineer at QUALCOMM
Posted Jan 10, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 in Seoul (South Korea) (took 5 days)
I can not get offer. then i don't know pay or bonus or other benefit.
Current i'm waiting phone interview. i don't know either how can i process the interview with them.
I also wonder their process.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at QUALCOMM
Posted Dec 7, 2011
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Sep 2011 in Hyderabad (India) (took 2 months)
I had applied in Qualcomm San Diego Online. My CV was shortlisted and I was interviewed by the Windows Device Drivers Team in Qualcomm for USB. Although I did very well answering 100% of the questions, but the hiring was not international. They pushed in my CV to QIPL with a recommendation. This was a telephonic interview for about 1 hour
Finally my Interview at Hyderabad started off.
Round 1 : - Telephonic Interview with Technical Leader/Manager :- 2 Hours (USB, OS, and C )
Two weeks after my telephonic Interview, they called me for On-Site Interview
Round 2 :- Technical interview by a Peer (Senior Engineer)
Round 3 :- Techincal interview by a Peer (This is the round where I felt I didn't know anything in depth)
Round 4 and 5:- This is done by a Leads. This is also technical
Round 6 and 7 :- Manager Round (Tech Manager and Section Manager)
Round 8 :- HR Round
Interview Questions
Compiling with Static Variables?
Why do we use volatile variables?
Program to reverse a Linked List
Program to insert a node in a Linked List
Setting/Clearing of Bits in a given 32 bit number
Program to find whether a given linked List is circular. (Should be able to do this without using a flag)
Palindrome, Concatenations etc without using the string operators
Pointers:- Constant pointers and pointer to a Constant. Its usage etc
Basic C programs done at Undergraduate level also
1. Threads, semaphores, Mutex, Processes
2. Difference between a Mutex and a Semaphore
3. Spin Locks and its usage
4. Priority inversion, Priority inheritance
5. Scheduling
6. DMA Usage and Syncing
7. Virtual Memory concepts
Negotiation Details
1. There is no scope of negotiation!
2. Well be assertive in your demands. I had demanded an amount X and I got it indirectly!
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 QUALCOMM
Posted Apr 23, 2011
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Feb 2011 in San Diego, CA (took 2 days)
After submitting my resume through their website, I received an invitation to interview with Qualcomm in San Diego. Initially, I had 2 phone screens, which were quite detailed and difficult. I was asked to submit code by email within 10 minutes after the phone screen. After that, I was invited to interview in San Diego. I interviewed in the graphics hardware simulation team.
The face-to-face interviews started with a talk with a HR person and after that came about 8 technical interviews with staff. Some of the 'technical' interviews were just chat and I don't really know what to think of that.
Other interviews were somewhat technical, with questions about bit manipulations, linked lists and CUDA. Two interviews I remember in particular. One with a senior staff engineer in research with limited English skills whose questions were very vague and impossible to answer. Another one was with a lady working on glsl who asked some very detailed api questions on glsl, which I found quite unfair. Memorizing very specific api functions and keywords does not tell anything about someone's skills. I guess those were the two people 'voting' against me. And two 'no's' appears to be enough not to be hired these days.
My pro's of Qualcomm are:
- Overall friendly people
- Beautiful location in San Diego
- Fairly good salary and benefits offered
My con's of Qualcomm are:
- Interview questions seemed rather arbitrary and not relevant for making a hiring decision
- Interviewers did not seem to be well prepared and did not seem very enthusiastic.
- The chat interviews were just useless
- Qualcomm is ethnically not very diverse and the limited knowledge of English of the interviewers hindered
the interview procedure a lot
- Qualcomm is not honest. Although there were a lot of job openings on their website, during the interview I
was told by the hr person and an interviewer that the position I was interviewing for was one of the few
open positions.
- Some of the interviewers, like the two I mentioned above, seemed to make it impossible to leave a good
impression. It is regrettable that Qualcomm bases it's hiring decision on employees that apparently have
their own agenda and for some reason don't want their team to expand.
- The phone screens were much more difficult than the on-site interviews. It didn't make sense to come to
San Diego for a day of additional 'technical' interviews.
Although I know I would have been up to the job perfectly and I do regret losing this chance of being able to move to California, I realize that there would have been a cultural mismatch between members of the graphics hardware simulation team and myself. In addition, mobile gpu's are very limited in what they can do and I know I would have been missing all the good things that desktop gpu's have to offer sooner or later.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at QUALCOMM
Posted Mar 15, 2011
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Feb 2011 in Santa Clara, CA (took 1+ week)
I was referred after attending a talk and asking the speaker for open positions. The speaker forwarded my resume to the BARD team in Santa Clara. A phone interview was set up quickly after that.
The phone interview was only about my research - what my PhD dissertation is about, how long it took me to implement some features, how much code I had to write.
No additional technical questions.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at QUALCOMM
Posted Jan 18, 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 Nov 2010 in San Diego, CA (took 3 months)
The hiring process takes a very long time which can be a bit frustrating.. The interview process was challenging but a lot of fun. About a month after submitting my resume I got an email to schedule a phone interview. The phone interview was just to see if I was worth bringing in for onsite interviews (which are very intense). I had my onsite interviews the following week and talked to 6 different people, each interview took about an hour. All the interviewers were very nice and pleasant and very knowledgable. I was most impressed. 5 of the interviews were technical (well the lunch interview was just shooting the breeze about software with the interviewer) and the last one was with the HR recruiter. Lots of technial questions (as expected) but also questions about dealing with people and what I'm looking for in a job. They really want to see if you're a fit for the Qualcomm team above and beyond your technical skills. There were questions about C/C++, differences between C++ and Java, object oriented design questions, and some system design questions.
Interview Questions
Negotiation Details
No negotiation, very attractive first offer.
Other Details
I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at QUALCOMM
Posted Oct 13, 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 Sep 2009 in San Diego, CA (took a day)
Interviewed for a position in Corporate R&D. Skills required were C++ and Python. Was quizzed on Python initially. Told interviewer don't have much experience there. Asked a whole bunch of questions on C++ including RAII, SFINAE. Implement a memcpy function. Did all of it quite well. Haven't heard back yet.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at QUALCOMM
Posted May 25, 2009
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Apr 2007 in Hyderabad (India) (took a day)
My Interview consisted of technical discussions with 5 different individuals 1:1.
It is a thoroughly technical interview in which following things are asked/evaluated - DSP(Digital Signal PRocessing) fundamentals, DSP Assembly language programming skills, C programming skills.
Questions which i remember now roughly -
DSP - Digital filters(IIT,FIR), their applications, design of filters, DSP algorithms like autocorrelation, convolution, DFT,FFT.
Assembly language programming - Solve simple problems(square root, cube, reciprocal) using only certain assemlby language mnemonic instructions(not all instructions are given to be avaiable)
C programming - Whats error in the code. whats the output of code,etc. Write code to solve some problems, factorial, etc.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at QUALCOMM
Posted Mar 18, 2009 — 5 of 6 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Declined Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2009 in San Diego, CA (took 3 weeks)
I saw a job on qualcomm website that was a good match for my skill set, so i applied for that job,after a few days i received an email from qualcomm HR department that they are interested in my resume and would like to set up a phone interview,so we decided on a date and time for the initial phone screen.
On the day of the phone interview,i got a call from a Senior Staff Engineer of the group that i was interviewing for,he gave me a brief introduction of the company and his group,then he proceeded to ask me questions about the projects on my resume,he also asked me basic C,C++ questions about pointers,classes,inheritance,virtual functions etc,i believe i gave him satisfactory answers, at the end of the interview he said he would recommend me for an on-site interview,i thanked him for the opportunity, the total length of the phone interview was about 60minutes.The interviewer was very pleasant,friendly and at the same time very professional in the way he conducted the phone interview.
After a couple of days after the phone interview i received an email from qualcomm's HR department that they would like to invite me for an on-site interview,i was told that the interview would last 4-6 hrs,so we decided on a date for the on-site interview and the HR person emailed me a map and address of the building where i would meet my first interviewer.
On the day of the on-site interview,i was scheduled to start the interview process at 9:30 AM,i found the building very easily and arrived in the lobby of the building at about 9:20AM,i checked in with the receptionist who was very friendly,she gave me a visitor's badge and called up my first interviewer who was a HR person and informed her of my arrival.I waited in the lobby for about 5 minutes when my first interviewer came down to meet me, i introduced myself to her and we took the elevator to the second floor where her office was located.She proceeded to ask me about my current job and why i was looking for other opportunities.Then she explained to me about all the benefits qualcomm offers to new hires.The entire process lasted about 45 minutes and it was time to meet my second interviewer who happened to be in the same building.
The second interviewer was a Staff Engineer,he quickly went over my resume and asked me questions about the projects that i had worked on so far,i answered all his questions to the best of my ability.Then he handed me a set of C,C++ puzzles and asked me to solve them,then we went over the puzzles together and he looked satisfied with my answers,it was almost 11AM and time to meet my third interviewer.
The third interviewer was in a different building which was only a couple of blocks away from my current location,so i drove to the other building and checked in with the receptionist in the second building,i waited in the lobby for about 3 minutes when my third interviewer came down to meet me.The third interviewer was a Senior Staff Engineer, we talked about the company for quite some time,he gave me a very good introduction about his group and the products they were working on.I asked him a lot of questions about his group and also what responsibilities the job would entail.He was very patient with me and gave detailed answers to all of my questions, it was about 11:55AM and time to meet my fourth interviewer.
The fourth interviewer was a Senior Engineer in the group that i was interviewing for,it was exactly 12:00 PM, he invited me for lunch and we just walked outside the building and across the street to a food court, as we waited for the food to arrive my fourth interviewer started asking me questions about the work i was doing at my current company, i answered him to the best of my ability, i also got an opportunity to ask him questions about his group and the products they were working on.We finished eating our food, it was about 12:45PM, we walked back to the building and it was time to meet my fifth interviewer.
My fifth interviewer was a Senior Staff Engineer, he was very friendly and asked me about my work and why i was looking for a change,he also explained to me about the products they were working on and how they were planning to increase their staff strength to meet their needs.He then proceeded to ask me general technical questions about communication systems to which i answered to the best of my ability.It was about 1:30PM and time to meet my sixth interviewer.
The sixth interviewer was a Senior Engineer,he was very polite, he proceeded to ask me basic C,C++ questions about pointers, classes, inheritance etc. Most of the questions were very straight forward and i believe i answered all the questions to best of my ability.It was about 2:00 PM and my interviewer escorted me back to the lobby of the building, i thanked him for his courtesy, i returned my visitor's badge to the receptionist and walked out of the building and that ended my 5 hour interview process.
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?
Senior Software Engineer at QUALCOMM
Posted Mar 19, 2009
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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 May 2008 in San Diego, CA (took a day)
After phone screening I went for a 6 hour onsite 1:1 interview with 6 persons ( 5 technical:1 HR). Interview lasted for about 6 hours. Technical interview focused on problem solving, programming skills. They were not much interested in what I did in my previous jobs.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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