Applied online, and was called for a phone interview within two weeks.

The phone interview was with my would-be manager, who said the interview would take 30 minutes. Instead, we talked for 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Two weeks later, I received notice from someone at Qualcomm stating I needed two more phone interviews with people in San Diego. WTF? I mean, the job is in the UK, so why do tech people in San Diego need to talk to me?

Anyway, I talked to the people in San Diego. The first person called a bit late, and the interview ran 45 minutes instead of the allotted 30, which made me late for the next call. The next interviewer huffily blamed the lateness on me.

Both San Diego interviews were technical but amounted to mostly me explaining how to multiply two fixed-point numbers and answering minor, uninteresting C-specific type questions. Nothing was said about the actual job.

I was invited to an onsite interview in the UK.

The in-person interview was very technical, with details not very relevant to the position. They asked me again how to multiply floating-point numbers. You'd think they'd know how to look that up by now! Then they asked, "What's a Q15 representation?" These were all questions that were rather too specific and irrelevant to a comms DSP position.

Then I got a written test with questions involving deciphering what a piece of code was doing. The piece of code was computing x raised to the power n, but it was programmed in a very weird, obfuscated, inefficient way involving taking the modulo of n to determine whether n was odd or even, with lots of unnecessary steps. This made me worry that that was how they actually wrote code at Qualcomm.

They also asked me, "What is j raised to the power j?" When I answered, "It is the square root of minus one raised to the square root of minus one," they didn't like the answer.

They did not describe what the job entailed, nor did they give me time to ask questions or look much at the real work they were doing, other than a very cursory, superficial "lab tour."

Two weeks later, they said they "wanted to move forward with the offer."

Then came silence. Two weeks after that, I wrote to ask what was going on. They claimed they wanted to discuss the offer by phone. I asked, "What offer, since you haven't sent me one?" They were adamant on only discussing things verbally; nothing was ever written.

After a month, I finally got an informal "offer" by email, detailing salary but being nonspecific on other benefits, including stock option price and vesting period, and bonuses. This gave me no real way to seriously evaluate the offer due to the lack of details.

Analyze a piece of code which was incredibly badly written.