I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Markham, ON) in May 2020
Interview
I got the interview through a referral from a friend working in the Markham office. My interview consisted of three rounds - the first was an online interview through an online coding IDE where I was expected to resolve some basic problems in front of some experienced engineers. This took about an hour.
The second round was a sort of rotating interview where we discussed everything from how I think about designing applications, to how I'd solve some more advanced problems. A big emphasis was placed on the ability to optimize a solution to a problem once a baseline was created. An online coding IDE was used one again when it came time for me to write some code. This took about 3 hours.
The final round was a conversation I had with a member of Qualcomm's HR team to go over some HR/behavioral questions. What really helped me prepare and be successful here, in my opinion, was the fact that I had been reviewing Amazon's leadership principals for some time by then. Being able to respond well to questions concerning Amazon's leadership principals is a great way for an engineer to prepare for any behavioral interview IMO,
----
The interview process was really great. I felt like nothing that was too out of the ordinary was asked of me. Everyone I spoke to was kind and respectful.
Although a week after I completed the last round, I received a notification that the position had been put on hold. Especially after having spent a little more than a month dedicating myself to the process, I was and still am extremely disappointed that things couldn't proceed more positively. However, given that we are in a pandemic presently, and with many things in flux, the decision to freeze hiring was understandable. It was just very poor timing I imagine for the fact that the hiring freeze was set at the end of my completion of all interview rounds.
The interviewers were very friendly through out the interview. The two of them asked a lot of technical questions, one mainly for machine learning related stuff, the other on scheduling tasks. Both were open to discussions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you declare an int and two doubles to use space in memory as efficiently as possible?
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Toronto, ON) in May 2019
Interview
Applied on the website, 30 minutes phone interview followed by a fullday onsite in Toronto. the questions are relatively easy, the hardest question is a depth first search. The team there seems to work on the state of the art, and the project sounds pretty interesting
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
how to efficiently find the number of 1 in the binary representation of a 32 bit number