I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2011
Interview
Was contacted and asked to meet one person. Subsequently went in spent most of a day meeting 5 people.
Their interview process seems to be structured for someone who is not very senior. They ask a lot of very basic questions on digital design, DSP, communications.
Found that most of the interviewers had a lot less experience and so their perspective is very limited. Out of the 6 people met, in total three seemed to adapt to the level of the person being interviewed while the others stuck to the type of questioning for a mid to junior level person and not the type of interview someone with more than 2 decades of experience would expect. Some of them did not seem to understand the topics they were asking questions on and failed to understand things when alternate solutions were proposed or it was pointed out what they were saying is incorrect.. Sent one of them excerpts from text books subsequently.
For a senior person, I woud have expected them to discuss past work experience, and get into technical discussions of past projects and how it relates to what they do, chip architecture, etc. They stuck to mostly simple questions such as synchronization, FIFOS, state machines, C syntax, PERL syntax, etc. Only two or three of them seemed to a have broader perspective, the rest seemed to be run of the mill with no idea as to how conduct a proper interview.
I applied online. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Raleigh, NC) in Jan 2010
Interview
Received a phone call to schedule a phone interview. Then received a phone call with 2-3 engineers and answered some technical questions. Subsequently scheduled an on-site interview.
There were 4 sessions each about an hour with 2-3 people. Questions about micro-architecture and logic design were asked. Variable-width adder, pipeline control, cache configuration, multiplier, etc.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a variable data-width parallel adder that can optionally be signed or cosigned using a minimal number of bits.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Qualcomm in Feb 2010
Interview
I got a short phone interview and then went flew onsite. Most of the people were cool, but I had one really bad interviewer. She was asking stuff that I didn't even put on my resume. The questions weren't very hard, but still unexpected. The general attitude of everyone there was not very good. It seems like they were all stressed out.