I applied online. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Qualcomm (San Diego, CA) in Feb 2011
Interview
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.
It is first round with HM. HM digging deep on my resume bullets. HM mainly asked behavioral questions for each bullets. Overall experience is great. We had great conversations. one pseudo coding on parallel programming.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Noida) in Dec 2025
Interview
They gave no idea about overall process. Just calling to scheduling rounds. No alignment discussions. Just kept on taking technical rounds without sharing any details of role. And post all rounds gave an offer way below my current compensation. Overall wasted my time & I would recommended anyone in my network to go with them.
4 technical rounds were there. Mostly general - DSA, sorting & searching algos, some hard leetcode, system design & resume deep dive.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Sorting & searching algos, Hard leetcode, resume deep dive
I got the referral from employee and my resume shortlisted. There is a hacker rank test and followed by three interviews and hr discussion.
Process was smooth and all my interviews are done in one day.