I applied online for a software engineer position at QCT. After four days, I received an email inviting me to a phone interview. The phone interview took place three days later. A senior software engineer called and asked questions based on my resume, as well as basic OS questions (demand paging, OS memory architecture, etc.). However, I feel the questions are not always standard and depend more on the interviewer.

I was then invited for an onsite interview. QCOM arranged for my flight, car, and hotel. The hotel was a 10-minute drive from the QCOM campus. Their buildings are spread out in that particular area (around Mera Mesa Road).

The interview day:

At 9:30 AM, I met with HR, who explained the benefits and whom I would be meeting throughout the day. I was scheduled to interview with six people.

At 10:00 AM, I drove to another building for an interview with the Engineering team. The first interviewer was a relatively junior member of the team but was very friendly. He asked me about my previous work, his team's responsibilities, and the department's structure. He then asked most of the questions from my resume. He inquired about RTOS (preemptive vs. non-preemptive), cache, and which bus peripherals were connected to, among other things. I wouldn't consider this interview to be highly technical. At the end of the interview, he walked me to the next interviewer's room.

At 10:45 AM, the person I was scheduled to meet called in sick. I waited in the lobby.

At 11:30 AM, I joined a senior director (the "big boss") for lunch. He was a down-to-earth person. He asked about my previous company, my work background, the amount of coding I did in my previous job, and some technical questions/problems I had dealt with that I mentioned in my resume. He arranged for another interviewer in the technical area I mentioned knowing most about (to compensate for the interviewer who called in sick).

At 1:00 PM, I met a senior member of the team. He asked some good technical questions based on my resume. Most of these questions were technical, but there were no programming questions up to this point. Then, I was asked the following question: "If we want to limit certain processes A, B, C, D, etc., to have a maximum heap allocation of, say, 60K, 20K, 10K, and 10K respectively, what is the way you would implement this?" He asked for the steps to design or the logic to implement this. HINT: wrapper malloc function. He then asked me to write a simple program to concatenate two strings. He was also very friendly and down-to-earth. He walked me to the next interviewer's room.

At 2:00 PM, I met another senior member of the team. I noticed many accomplishment certificates on his wall. He was also very friendly and asked me about my previous company, my work, and problems I had faced/solved based on my resume. In the last 20 minutes, he presented a heap corruption problem on the board, and again, the answer involved a wrapper malloc function. I got the impression that their favorite topic is the wrapper malloc function. This interview didn't go very well.

At 3:00 PM, I met the next interviewer. He was not very pleasant. He asked some technical questions based on my experience listed on my resume. Then, he asked me to write a prototype, mention the assumptions, and implement a program to sort an array and return the median value.

At 4:00 PM, I met another senior member of the team. He was very polite and highly intelligent. He acknowledged that I must be somewhat stressed by the interviews throughout the day, so he asked system-level questions: designing a mobile device, considering the factors involved, and how I would approach it. He then asked about software design implementation from a software perspective. He asked me to describe the code flow/modules when a call is placed on a mobile device. He told me about the work they are doing with standards committees, etc. He was a very humble and knowledgeable person.

He walked me out, and then I drove back. End of story. Although no two interviews are the same, I hope my experience story is useful for future interviewers.

Good luck.

How will you find or incriminate a thread that is causing heap corruption within a process among different threads?