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Engineer Interview Experience - Santa Clara, California

June 1, 2011
Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I was contacted and asked to meet one person. Subsequently, I went in and spent most of a day meeting five people.

Their interview process seems to be structured for someone who is not very senior. They asked a lot of very basic questions on digital design, DSP, and communications.

I found that most of the interviewers had significantly less experience, and therefore their perspective felt very limited. Out of the six people I met, only three seemed to adapt to the level of the person being interviewed. The others stuck to the type of questioning for a mid to junior level person, rather than the type of interview someone with more than two decades of experience would expect.

Some of them did not seem to understand the topics they were asking questions on and failed to grasp alternate solutions when proposed, or when it was pointed out that their statements were incorrect. I subsequently sent one of them excerpts from textbooks.

For a senior person, I would have expected them to discuss past work experience and delve into technical discussions of past projects and how they relate to the company's work, chip architecture, etc. They stuck to mostly simple questions such as synchronization, FIFOs, state machines, C syntax, and Perl syntax.

Only two or three of them seemed to have a broader perspective; the rest seemed to be run-of-the-mill with no idea how to conduct a proper interview.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 3 interview experiences for the Qualcomm Engineer role in Santa Clara, California.

Success Rate

33%
Pass Rate

Qualcomm's interview process for their Engineer roles in Santa Clara, California is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive67%
Neutral0%
Negative33%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Qualcomm's Engineer interview process in Santa Clara, California.

Qualcomm Work Experiences