I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at AMD (Markham, ON) in Mar 2010
Interview
All communications were through email; from sending in my resume, to setting up the interview. The only phone call I had was when the offer was made.
The interview was an all-day affair from 9am to ~4pm; and consisted of interviewing with 4 people. The first was a discussion with the hiring manager which was a smooth discussion discussing grad work and confirming the alignment of my degrees with the expectations of the job.
Then I had three technical interviews by senior engineers who had no background in my field of study. Each interviewer presented some general problem solving questions; nothing difficult, but nothing that can be prepared for. I was given a tour of the office and met with a couple of people that I would be working with.
As it was my first job, the process seemed normal; however, in hindsight there are a couple of red flags that I should have seen. If I were to experience any of these again, I would never accept a position with the company.
Red Flag 1. I drove 3 hours for the interview and there was never any mention of reimbursement for gas or mileage. It's the only interview I've had where I've never been reimbursed for travel.
Red Flag 2. I was on my own for lunch. Not only did they not buy me lunch, they didn't even accompany me as part of a personality interview. I was just cut loose for an hour. Again, the only interview I've had where this has happened.
Red Flag 3. I was never given the opportunity to ask questions. I was grilled for 4 hours and never had a chance to ask anything! Each technical interview ended when the next interviewer interrupted, or the last guy realized his time was up. It speaks volumes to how a company values prospective employees when they don't give the interviewee a chance to do some digging.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The most difficult question had to do with expected range of a voltage divider given component tolerances, as well as the distribution of tolerances and resulting distribution of output voltage.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at AMD (Sunnyvale, CA)
Interview
Standard interview questions for programming job. One debugging question. One recursion question. One problem with using gates (come up with some logic). About 6 people. 1 person takes you for lunch at the cafeteria. Hiring process was overall ok. I got proper phone and/or email updates during the process. overall experience was ok. Interviewers were sort of "normal" in the sense that they weren't intimidating nor ultra friendly - just had a normal interviewer poker face.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There wasn't anything extremely difficult of unexpected or out of ordinary.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at AMD (Austin, TX) in May 2012
Interview
2 phone screens, 7 people interviewed me in person; lasted from 7:45AM to 2PM. Got offer in 1-2 weeks. It was very pleasant ; and I liked Austin, TX a lot. Team is highly technical and in general will not take BSing well. Some questions on brainteasers but mostly technical hardware and software related.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
About trace driven vs execution driven modeling. Trace driven modeling is faster; and but is less realistic due to not exploring bad paths during branch prediction. Execution driven modeling usually requires the existence of a functional model - in addition to a timing model to do neat things like sampling etc.