After submitting my resume through their website, I received an invitation to interview with Qualcomm in San Diego. Initially, I had 2 phone screens, which were quite detailed and difficult. I was asked to submit code by email within 10 minutes after the phone screen. After that, I was invited to interview in San Diego. I interviewed in the graphics hardware simulation team.
The face-to-face interviews started with a talk with a HR person and after that came about 8 technical interviews with staff. Some of the 'technical' interviews were just chat and I don't really know what to think of that.
Other interviews were somewhat technical, with questions about bit manipulations, linked lists and CUDA. Two interviews I remember in particular. One with a senior staff engineer in research with limited English skills whose questions were very vague and impossible to answer. Another one was with a lady working on glsl who asked some very detailed api questions on glsl, which I found quite unfair. Memorizing very specific api functions and keywords does not tell anything about someone's skills. I guess those were the two people 'voting' against me. And two 'no's' appears to be enough not to be hired these days.
My pro's of Qualcomm are:
- Overall friendly people
- Beautiful location in San Diego
- Fairly good salary and benefits offered
My con's of Qualcomm are:
- Interview questions seemed rather arbitrary and not relevant for making a hiring decision
- Interviewers did not seem to be well prepared and did not seem very enthusiastic.
- The chat interviews were just useless
- Qualcomm is ethnically not very diverse and the limited knowledge of English of the 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 it's hiring decision on employees that 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 gpu's are very limited in what they can do and I know I would have been missing all the good things that desktop gpu's have to offer sooner or later.
