Two weeks after applying online, I was contacted by the hiring manager for a technical phone screen. We went over pointers and simple function design and testing on a shared Word document.

Two weeks later, I went in for a full-day interview at the Boulder campus. There were 13 other candidates there doing the same thing.

I had:

• Four hour-long technical interviews with different members of various teams
• One half-hour long interview with HR

They fed us lunch and gave a brief recruiting presentation.

Two weeks later, they sent a generic email stating, "Although we were very impressed with your background and qualifications, we are unable to offer you a position with Qualcomm at this time."

Overall, it seemed like they were more interested in finding bookworms fresh out of school with no practical working experience than someone with actual embedded engineering experience.

Make sure to study linked lists, binary trees, and more linked lists, because that is all they seem to care about!

Whiteboard exercises:

• Find the first non-recurring character in a string. For example, input "abbcdcaea" would return "d".
• Find the degrees between the minute hand and hour hand when a clock is at 3:15.
• Implement a queue (FIFO) with push/pop functionality using linked lists.
• Create a custom malloc and free function using linked lists.
• Swap the values of two pointers without a temporary variable.
• Write a function that determines if a given variable is a power of 2 or not.

Topics covered:

• Scheduling
• Context switching
• Memory management
• Linked lists