Status: New grad, MS / ME / MTech from IISC / IIT / BITS Pilani.
Position: Engineer
Location: Hyderabad, India.
Date: 29 - 07 - 2020.

This is a On Campus recruitment process, In the wake of Covid-19 Pandemic all interviews were conducted online. Platforms used were Hackerank CodePair and Microsoft Teams. Joining is from July '21.

Interview Process:

Online Assessment:
This test has two parts
1. Aptitude & Reasoning: around 25 questions on Quatitative Aptitude. It's difficult to manage time for this round as 25 questions are to be solved in 30 minutes. A good strategy to prepare this would be to revise basic formulae from GFG
2. CS Fundamentals and C Programming / Debugging: This questions in this sections revolve around concepts from Computer Networks, Operating Systems, Computer Architechture and Mainly Data Structures and C Programming. 35 questions, 45 Minutes.

Technical Round 1 [ ~1 Hour ]:

• Interviewer had started with coding questions which were fairly simple. First was simpler variant of Matching brackets which can solved without stack, discussed both with and without stack and why stack was necessary in the original problem.
• Next Question was Diameter of the Tree.
• Following that Interview had asked questions about projects and Stressed over the project which involved IoT. Finally he asked me Puzzle on numbers, which can be found in Top 25 Puzzles on GFG, I couldn't solve the puzzle.
• Behavioural?: Asked me what do I know about Qualcomm, What's the first thing you look for when you are purchasing a phone. Do you know which part is responsible for all the communications in a Phone?

Technical Round 2 [ ~1 Hour ]:

• Started with tell me about yourself and asking me to explain each of my projects in detail, followed with a coding question on Bit Manipulation, It was kind of easy but Interviewer wanted me demonstrate different ways of sharing a variable like Global, Static, Pass by value and reference.
• Asked what does Volatile keyword do in C, which I could not recollect. Asked me about memory map of C in detail, explained.
• Process Synchronization and Semaphores in OS, explained. Little Endian vs Big-Endian, Will we have to change the way we access? with help from help from his side I could answer it matters only if word size is different, he seemed to be satisfied.
• He again visited a particular project on my resume which was on MPTCP, Computer Networks and asked questions on it, This time he was satisfied.

Hiring Manager Round:
Standard Questions like Tell me about yourself, Why Qualcomm, are you flexible with change in location and Interestingly he even asked what do my parents do. And he even told that it must be getting harder to bag job offers during pandemic, may be he was trying to know if I am here to take any job I get or genuinely interested in Qualcomm.

My first interview was scheduled at 08:30 AM and at around 11:00PM same day I got my first dream company offer. :)

Compensation: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/813401/Qualcomm-or-Engineer-or-India-or-On-Campus

Other details and key takeaways:

• I had done around 280 problems on leetcode and ~200 on other sites (hackerank, intervierwbit). I had practiced with companies such as Amazon, Uber and Flipkart etc. in mind which focus more on Competitive Programming than Qualcomm.

• Always visit the discuss section even if you were able to solve the problem.

• Prepare your resume throughly, One good way to do that is to revisit the project presentations/reports you made.

• Behavioural section from CTCI is a must read. Especially if you are a new grad.

Finally I would like to thank the LeetCode community for helping me fulfil my dreams. Cheers!