After submitting my resume through their website, I received an invitation to interview with Qualcomm in San Diego. Initially, I had two phone screens, which were quite detailed and difficult. I was asked to submit code by email within 10 minutes after each phone screen. After that, I was invited to interview in San Diego. I interviewed for a position on the graphics hardware simulation team.

The face-to-face interviews started with a talk with an HR person. After that came about eight technical interviews with staff. Some of these "technical" interviews were just casual conversation, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

Other interviews were somewhat technical, with questions about bit manipulations, linked lists, and CUDA. Two interviews I remember in particular. One was with a senior staff engineer in research who had limited English skills; their questions were very vague and impossible to answer. Another was with a woman working on GLSL who asked some very detailed API questions about GLSL, which I found quite unfair. Memorizing very specific API functions and keywords doesn't tell anything about someone's skills. I guess those were the two people "voting" against me. And two "no"s appear to be enough not to be hired these days.

My pros of Qualcomm are:

• Overall friendly people
• Beautiful location in San Diego
• Fairly good salary and benefits offered

My cons of Qualcomm are:

• Interview questions seemed rather arbitrary and not relevant for making a hiring decision.
• Interviewers did not seem well prepared and did not seem very enthusiastic.
• The casual conversation interviews were just useless.
• Qualcomm is ethnically not very diverse, and the limited knowledge of English of some interviewers hindered the interview procedure a lot.
• Qualcomm is not honest. Although there were a lot of job openings on their website, during the interview, I was told by the HR person and an interviewer that the position I was interviewing for was one of the few open positions.
• Some of the interviewers, like the two I mentioned above, seemed to make it impossible to leave a good impression. It is regrettable that Qualcomm bases its hiring decision on employees who apparently have their own agenda and for some reason don't want their team to expand.
• The phone screens were much more difficult than the on-site interviews. It didn't make sense to come to San Diego for a day of additional "technical" interviews.

Although I know I would have been up to the job perfectly and I do regret losing this chance of being able to move to California, I realize that there would have been a cultural mismatch between members of the graphics hardware simulation team and myself. In addition, mobile GPUs are very limited in what they can do, and I know I would have been missing all the good things that desktop GPUs have to offer sooner or later.

Remove an item from a double-linked list.

How does thread synchronization work in CUDA?