I was interviewed for two separate positions to be located in San Diego, one in late March 2020 and the other in late April 2020.

The first interview, for the first position (an Audio DSP Software Engineer role), was a technical phone interview with one of their engineers. The interviewer was late to the call by 40 minutes. He at least let me know that he'd be about 15 minutes late via email, but then he still didn't call me for another 25 minutes. This was already a red flag for me.

In the interview, he asked me very detailed questions on C, such as what sizeof() would return when used on a struct for which he provided the definition. I had to keep in mind the rules of byte padding in structs, which I did not remember clearly at the time. He then proceeded to ask me questions regarding multi-threading and critical sections. I thought the interview had gone alright, and he had at least promised me that I'd hear back soon. That did not happen.

I ended up having to ping my HR contact for this position a few weeks later, and still received no response. A month after that first interview, I pinged my HR contact again. Instead of getting a yes/no on whether I'd be moving forward, she asked if I'd be interested in interviewing for a separate position (Computer Vision Software Engineer), also in San Diego.

I agreed, thinking the first step would be a phone interview like for the first position, and gave her my availability for the following few days. However, instead of a phone screen, they wanted to schedule a full virtual on-site interview with three separate panels, with only 24 hours' notice. I asked if I could push the interview back to the following week, but they refused, and so I begrudgingly went through the virtual interview the next day.

The first two rounds of interviews were fine, and the interviewers were pretty friendly. Despite the role being a Computer Vision one, there were surprisingly few questions on CV concepts, which worked in my favor since I have little experience in that area. Most of the questions were about embedded software engineering concepts or OS concepts.

My last interviewer, who was only supposed to ask me questions for 45 minutes, ended up taking over two hours. He kept asking me a wide range of questions, from fundamental C concepts to algorithms to OS multi-threading concepts. One question he asked was how to detect a loop within a Linked-List. Luckily, I had encountered that same question before in a previous interview years ago, so I knew to suggest using Floyd's cycle detection algorithm and how to implement it. Strangely, he then asked what other solutions I could use that might not be as optimal. I suppose he was trying to gauge how I think about a problem, but it was still strange for him to ask for a non-optimal solution.

After the interview, I felt I had done pretty well, given only 24 hours' notice and almost no time to prepare (since I still had to work). I was told that I would hear back in two weeks. Of course, that was also not the case, and I kept pinging my HR contact. They finally got back to me almost a month after that interview, simply sending me what looked like an automated rejection letter.

This was a very messy and unorganized process, and my overall interview experience with them was pretty negative. I won't be applying to Qualcomm again for at least a few years after this.

Given the following struct definition in C, what would sizeof(myStruct) return?

c typedef struct { short a; long b; char c; } myStruct;

Given an image represented as an array of pixels, develop an algorithm that flips it 180 degrees.

Develop an algorithm to detect a cycle in a Linked-List.

Develop an algorithm to reverse the bits in a byte.

What are virtual functions?