I was contacted by an Akamai recruiter who found my resume on one of the popular sites. After some chatting with the recruiter, I was scheduled for and passed the phone screen. A four-hour in-person interview was scheduled for the following week (4 engineers x ~1 hour each), which went well and consisted of common questions about data structures, algorithms, design, whiteboard, and personal questions.

Four days later, I had my second on-site in the same four-hour format, except this time it was with the senior engineers. Here's where things went wrong: while I had great experiences with the engineers and the recruiter, the top people did not know the answers to their own questions.

One guy asked me to implement a factorial function, and once I first talked through my algorithm, he told me it was wrong. After a short discussion, it turned out he actually had Fibonacci numbers in mind. So, you don't know the difference between the two? It happens, I guess.

Then he took my solution, looked at it, and apparently it differed from what he had memorized online, so he said he would verify it later and walked out without even going over it with me.

Here's where it gets really good. The Director of Engineering asked me a Perl question where the use of "split" was required. As I started writing my solution, he rejected it on the basis that the outcome of one function call was wrong. I began to argue with him (respectfully) that I was right, to no avail.

After 5 minutes, he actually had me convinced that I indeed did not do it right, which completely threw me off. Today I decided to double-check using the Perl reference guide, and what do you know, I was right about it all along!

While I think I would have enjoyed working with the bright engineers at Akamai, I am sure glad that I will not work under superiors who lack basic CS knowledge and cannot solve their own questions.

Why would you like to work at Akamai?

Sorting, substring, and design questions.