Lead Firmware Engineer Interview Questions

952 lead firmware engineer interview questions shared by candidates

Puzzles 1: You have rope that take 60 min to burn. Speed of burning is not uniform. Example: it doesn't take 30 min to burn half Using two ropes, how would you get 45 min? Answer: First Rope. Burn both ends at same time Second Rope: Burn only one side. when First rope is totally burn, it's been 30 min, now burn the rest of second rope both ends. Which should take additional 15 min. 30 + 15 = 45 min. Puzzle 2: There is a guy in a boat holding a rope that's tight to a Top of pole in the shore. He keep pulling the rope until he reach the shore. What is the speed relationship between amount of rope he pulls, vs horizonal speed? Which speed is higher? Answer: Horizonal speed is faster than the amount of rope he pulls. (Horizonal distance he travel is higher than amount of rope he pulls, by triangle theory where sum of two sides must be greater than 3rd side) Puzzle 3: in Analog Clock, It's exacly 3:00 Clock. What time would the Hour hand, and Min hand would overlap each other?
avatar

Firmware Engineer

Interviewed at Qualcomm

3.8
May 7, 2011

Puzzles 1: You have rope that take 60 min to burn. Speed of burning is not uniform. Example: it doesn't take 30 min to burn half Using two ropes, how would you get 45 min? Answer: First Rope. Burn both ends at same time Second Rope: Burn only one side. when First rope is totally burn, it's been 30 min, now burn the rest of second rope both ends. Which should take additional 15 min. 30 + 15 = 45 min. Puzzle 2: There is a guy in a boat holding a rope that's tight to a Top of pole in the shore. He keep pulling the rope until he reach the shore. What is the speed relationship between amount of rope he pulls, vs horizonal speed? Which speed is higher? Answer: Horizonal speed is faster than the amount of rope he pulls. (Horizonal distance he travel is higher than amount of rope he pulls, by triangle theory where sum of two sides must be greater than 3rd side) Puzzle 3: in Analog Clock, It's exacly 3:00 Clock. What time would the Hour hand, and Min hand would overlap each other?

Q. Tell me about you experiences. A. I told him my history of employment and the kind of technical experiences I was into. Q. Tell me about any hobby project you did. A. This was surprising and funny in a way that after 8 years of experience somebody would ask me about my hobby projects rather than my real experiences during my years of employment. Anyways I told him that apart from my work experience I have experience of reverse engineering the window PEs. Q. What database have you used? A. I asked him that I had not used any database but I have used data structures. Q. What is difference between array and linked list A. This is pretty basic and quite easy I answered it based upon the complexity of insertion and seek time. Q. How would you connect two PCs available on the internet to pass data from one to another? A. I told him that one can use a technic similar to one used in torrent servers, which is to establish data connections between peers by letting each know others IPs and some other identifiers like socket number used to identify the service. Q. What is the difference between unit testing and integration testing? A. Again a very basic and easy question to answer. Q. How would two thread share a common resource? A. Using locks. Q. That may lead to deadlocks what else can be used? A. I answered Messages. (Though this also does not guarantee against deadlocks and underlying mechanism use locks for implementation), I figured out the interviewer worked in erlang and erlang uses messages to arbitrate resources, that is why he is having such hypothesis. Q. When to use a thread or process? A. Thread is light weight and process is heavy weight, if more switching use thread if more persistent tasks use processes. He then ended the interview here itself. I told him that if he is not getting late, may I ask him few questions, he told me to go ahead. I appreciated his patience. As I had 18 to 19 questions. Following are the questions that I asked the interviewer. Q. How do you define the business model of GreyOrange? A robotics company into warehouse automation or a warehouse automation company using robots? A. He answered that if GreyOrange had to expand it would expand into robotics area, this was surprising for me given that their other product is a non-robotic warehouse automation product. Also their website states the same that it’s a warehouse automation company. Q. Is their product the butler system complementary to AS/RS (Automatic Storage and Retrieval System) or is it a replacement of ASRS? How is it a better system than an AS/RS? A. He did not know what an ASRS is this again was surprising given they themselves are building a product which does the same. I told him what a typical ASRS is after which he replied that it is a replacement of an AS/RS. I didn’t ask him how is it better than an ASRS. Q. Are you doing something similar to BigData. A. He replied that no they are not into BigData they are using machine learning to churn out data collected from various warehouses in order to predict the future. This again was surprising because this is what predictive analysis is in BigData but I think he didn't know the similarity between what they were doing and BigData. Q. How is the Brian of their butler system was distributed whether discreetly as in a DCS or central to the network? A. The answer was but funny, he said both, distributed as well as central. Actually they have a central system with redundancy which I figured out from the way he described their architecture. Q. Do you have people manager in your company? A. He said yes. I asked him whether they have people manager or product manager, to which he got confused. I guess he didn't know the difference between these two.
avatar

Firmware Software Engineer

Interviewed at GreyOrange

3.4
Jun 12, 2015

Q. Tell me about you experiences. A. I told him my history of employment and the kind of technical experiences I was into. Q. Tell me about any hobby project you did. A. This was surprising and funny in a way that after 8 years of experience somebody would ask me about my hobby projects rather than my real experiences during my years of employment. Anyways I told him that apart from my work experience I have experience of reverse engineering the window PEs. Q. What database have you used? A. I asked him that I had not used any database but I have used data structures. Q. What is difference between array and linked list A. This is pretty basic and quite easy I answered it based upon the complexity of insertion and seek time. Q. How would you connect two PCs available on the internet to pass data from one to another? A. I told him that one can use a technic similar to one used in torrent servers, which is to establish data connections between peers by letting each know others IPs and some other identifiers like socket number used to identify the service. Q. What is the difference between unit testing and integration testing? A. Again a very basic and easy question to answer. Q. How would two thread share a common resource? A. Using locks. Q. That may lead to deadlocks what else can be used? A. I answered Messages. (Though this also does not guarantee against deadlocks and underlying mechanism use locks for implementation), I figured out the interviewer worked in erlang and erlang uses messages to arbitrate resources, that is why he is having such hypothesis. Q. When to use a thread or process? A. Thread is light weight and process is heavy weight, if more switching use thread if more persistent tasks use processes. He then ended the interview here itself. I told him that if he is not getting late, may I ask him few questions, he told me to go ahead. I appreciated his patience. As I had 18 to 19 questions. Following are the questions that I asked the interviewer. Q. How do you define the business model of GreyOrange? A robotics company into warehouse automation or a warehouse automation company using robots? A. He answered that if GreyOrange had to expand it would expand into robotics area, this was surprising for me given that their other product is a non-robotic warehouse automation product. Also their website states the same that it’s a warehouse automation company. Q. Is their product the butler system complementary to AS/RS (Automatic Storage and Retrieval System) or is it a replacement of ASRS? How is it a better system than an AS/RS? A. He did not know what an ASRS is this again was surprising given they themselves are building a product which does the same. I told him what a typical ASRS is after which he replied that it is a replacement of an AS/RS. I didn’t ask him how is it better than an ASRS. Q. Are you doing something similar to BigData. A. He replied that no they are not into BigData they are using machine learning to churn out data collected from various warehouses in order to predict the future. This again was surprising because this is what predictive analysis is in BigData but I think he didn't know the similarity between what they were doing and BigData. Q. How is the Brian of their butler system was distributed whether discreetly as in a DCS or central to the network? A. The answer was but funny, he said both, distributed as well as central. Actually they have a central system with redundancy which I figured out from the way he described their architecture. Q. Do you have people manager in your company? A. He said yes. I asked him whether they have people manager or product manager, to which he got confused. I guess he didn't know the difference between these two.

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