I applied online for a software engineer position at QCT. After 4 days, got an email that they would like to conduct a phone interview. Phone interview took place after 3 days. A senior software engineer called and asked questions about from my resume and basic OS questions (demand paging, OS memory architecture etc) - But I think the questions are not something standard, it depends more on the person who calls you.
I was called onsite. QCOM arranged for flight, car, hotel. Hotel was within 10 min drive to QCOM campus. Their buildings are spread all over the place in that particular area (around Mera Mesa road).
The interview day:
At 9:30 am - I met HR and she told me about benefits and whom I will be meeting during the day. I was to be interviewed / meet with 6 people at interview.
At 10:00 - I drove to another building for interview with Engineering team. First interviewer was relatively junior member in team but he was very friendly. He asked me about what I did, what his team do, the structure of the department. Then he asked most of the questions from my resume. He asked about RTOS (preemptive vs non preemptive), cache, what bus the peripheral was connected to etc.. - I would not consider this interview to much technical. At the end of interview he walked me to the room of another interviewer.
At 10:45 - the person I was to meet called in sick. I waited in lobby.
At 11:30 - I went with senior director (big boss) for lunch. He was down-to-earth person. He asked about my company, my work background, what amount of coding I did in my previous job, some technical questions/ problems I dealt with that I mentioned in resume etc. He arranged for another interviewer in the technical area that I mentioned I know most (in lieu of the missing interviewer who called in sick).
At 1:00 - I met a senior member of team. He asked some good technical questions based on my resume. Most of the questions, were technical questions but no programming questions till this point. Then I was asked the following question: If we want to limit certain processes A, B, C, D etc to have max heap that can be allocated to say - 60K, 20K, 10K, 10K respectively. So what is the way you do it. He asked me the steps to design or logic to implement this. HINT: wrapper malloc function. Then he asked me to write a simple program to write a program to concatenate two strings. He was also very friendly and down-to-earth. He walked me to next interviewer's room
At 2:00 - I met another senior member of team. I saw lot of accomplishment certs on his wall. He was also very friendly and he asked me about my previous company, work, problems I faced/ solved based on my resume. In last 20 min, he asked a heap corruption problem on board and again answer to this was wrapper malloc function. I got the impression that their favorite topic is wrapper malloc function. This one didnt go very well.
At 3:00 - I met next interviewer. He was not very nice. He asked some technical questions based on my experience listed on resume. Then he asked me to write a prototype, mention the assumptions and implementation of a program ( to sort an arrray and return median value).
At 4:00 - I met another senior member of team. He was very very polite and highly intelligent. He told me that you must be somewhat stressed by the interviews throughout day, so he asked me system level questions - to design a mobile device - what factors to consider and how would you approach it. Then he asked about software design implementation from software perspective. He asked me to tell code flow / modules when a call is placed on a mobile device. He told me about the work they are doing with standards committee etc. He was very humble and knowledgeable person.
He walked me out. Then I drove back. End of story. Although no two interviews are same, I hope my experience story is useful for future interviewers.
Good luck.