Farnborough, Hampshire, South East England, England
Declined offer
Negative experience
Average interview
Application
I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Farnborough, Hampshire, South East England, England) in Nov 2009
Interview
Applied online, called on phone interview within 2 weeks. The phone interview was from my would be manager who said the interview would take 30 minutes. Instead, we talked for 1 hour, 20 minutes.
Two weks later I get notice from some person at Qualcomm to tell me I need to have 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, talk to people in San Diego. First person calls a bit late, interview runs 45 mins instead of the allotted 30, which makes me late for the next call, and the next interviewer huffily blames the lateness on me. Both San Diego interviews were technical but amounted to mostly me explaining how to multiply two fixed point numbers and minor uninteresting C specific type questions. Nothing is said about the actual job..
Invited to 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 that they'd know how to look it up by now! Then they asked me "what's a Q15 representation?" 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, inneficient way involving taking modulo of n to determine whether n was odd or even, etc (lots of unnecessary steps) that made me worry that that was the way they actually wrote code at Qualcomm. They also asked me what is j raised to the power j and when I answered "It is sqrt(minus one) raised to the sqrt(minus one) " they didn't like the answer.
They did not describe to me what the job entailed, nor gave 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 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, thus giving me no real way to seriously evaluate the offer due to lack of details.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Analyze a piece of code which was incredibly badly written