I was approached by an in-house recruiter through my LinkedIn profile. The recruiter sent me a summary job description that piqued my interest. I also checked out Adobe's benefits, and they're roughly on par with my current company's.

So I contacted her and told her I'm not actively looking, but the job seemed fun, and Adobe seems like a nice place to work for.

Then I got into a technical phone screen with the hiring manager, which didn't seem all that technical. He was mostly concerned with my work history. I also made a point to tell him I was not actively looking to leave my current company; that Adobe contacted ME with a job that seemed worthy of discussion.

That might have sold him because I think I bombed his technical grilling. I had to admit I didn't know OpenGL (ES) that well, and we even went so far as to talk about a graphics project I did in school (a LOOOONG time ago).

Morale of this story: if you put something on your CV, be ready to talk about it!

So, to my surprise, I got called in for a F2F interview a couple days later. I talked to their lead architect, senior manager, the hiring manager, and a code grunt with bad BO.

What I THOUGHT was going to be a rather easy-going discussion about how I could meet the team's goals turned into an all-out grilling on technical topics that were way over the top for an interview timeslot. They love their threading with C++ and hard-core ASM.

I made my overall dissatisfaction known about the high difficulty level imposed by the team to the HR lady and basically told her not to send me a rejection letter.

In reality, I should have followed my gut instinct and left after talking to their architect. No sense in wasting my time there further.

In any case, I would still interview at Adobe, but I hope they'll still be around as an independent corporate entity and not gobbled up by the Microsoft borg cube.

How would I write a scoped mutex object?

This was asked by their architect.

How would I design a "data-pump" queueing structure for handling the producer-consumer problem?

What common ASM instructions can you think of, and can you generate the assembly output for a simple C for-loop?

Example: for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++);

Asked by the hiring manager.