I applied to the company on their career website. I previously knew about them, as they are a very large and prominent company in San Diego.

A few days later, I received an email from HR to schedule a phone interview.

The phone interview consisted of two, 45-minute sessions: one with an HR representative who spoke extremely fast about Qualcomm (benefits, etc.) and asked a short, general interest question (Why Qualcomm?), and a technical phone interview.

The technical interview included basic object-oriented programming questions, specifics on Java (references), and one string manipulation question.

One thing that stood out: the technical phone interviewer did not seem very knowledgeable. She asked me to swap two variables without a temporary variable. I gave her the usual XOR answer; she then asked if Java had a XOR method. Face-palm I was unsure if she knew how to code or just knew Java at that point.

The scheduler contacted me about a week later to move forward with an on-site interview, which I believe was scheduled about 10 days after that.

The on-site interview took up an entire day and consisted of seven people, one of whom took me out to lunch.

The first person provided a basic overview of the company. She seemed to grasp my potential expertise and added a person to the interview list.

The second person was awesome and took me to lunch, but didn't ask questions while eating (I generally appreciate people who understand the importance of food). He mostly asked questions about stacks, linked lists versus arrays, etc.

The next interviewer focused primarily on working in group dynamics.

Most of the interviewers asked, "How would you test ____?" and expected me to come up with test cases.

The only hiccup was that the added interviewer wasn't quite as prepared as everyone else, but given that the change was last-minute, that was understandable.

I didn't hear back from HR for two weeks, so I sent a follow-up email.

HR emailed back stating that QCT was undergoing a re-organization, so even though I did well in the interview, they likely wouldn't be hiring anyone for a while. :(

Other Notes:

PROS -- Free lunch~ and free candy in the waiting room Their facilities are awesome, and they let you play with display devices (HTC phones, Kindle, Nook, anything with a Qualcomm chip in it) in the waiting room of the career building. They also provide rides if you didn't bring a car. They were extremely organized and very professional (no long waiting times, no interviewers goofing off).

CONS -- Feet hurt a lot after walking back and forth between two buildings. (Would not suggest shoes that lose their comfort after 2 hours.) Rather long wait time between the phone and the on-site interview.

What are the differences between a linked list and an array? What are the pros and cons? In what situations would you use each?

Can a stack be a queue? Can a queue be a stack?

Tell me about yourself. How did you get into computer engineering (or your relevant college major)?

What were your group projects like? How did you decide who did what? Do you prefer to work in groups or alone? Do you prefer big groups or small groups? What's the difference between working with just one partner versus many people?

Initialize a 5x5 array with this sequence:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

How do you test a traffic light? How do you test a DVD player?

Write strcpy (string copy). What test cases would you have?

Write strrev (string reverse) in place. (A temporary character is fine.)