Qualcomm came to my university for a Tech Talk. I had been in contact with their HR department since last year when they came for the previous tech talk. Since I was "coming back" I was grilled on "why Qualcomm?" They asked me a lot of questions about my background and interests. The main HR guy spent a while explaining how the opportunities in the lab I want to work in are very limited (that is: it's a small lab that's very hard to get into). That afternoon I got an email from their interview coordinator setting up an interview for later that week. Thursday morning I met with an engineer from the division I was interested in down in San Diego. We talked for a while about his work, about Qualcomm in general, about my background and interests, and then he went ahead with the technical questions. When I got home I created an account on their website and applied for the positions that interested me. Then I sent a follow-up email expressing my excitement about the lab, thanking the HR person for her time, and asking about next steps. During the interview, he asked me to write several simple algorithms: reverse a string, copy a string, and count the number of "on" bits in a binary number. He also asked me about running times of these algorithms, and then asked about my favorite data structures. He wanted to know why certain types of trees were better than other trees - mostly highish-level conceptual stuff, not details of implementation.