A software engineer sat next to me and asked a couple of questions. The questions were generally easy, but having someone watching over your shoulder as you code creates a lot of pressure that usually doesn't happen in the real world.

The interviewer seemed to be waiting for me to make a mistake so he could say something. "We get it, you know how to solve the problem because you've done it a million times, but give people a chance to solve it on their own." I wasn't even allowed to use gdb to debug my solution; he just wanted me to one-shot the problem on my first try, which is difficult under that kind of pressure.

At the end, he spent about five minutes asking how a void function returns a parameter. I must have said "using pointers" at least three times, but he just kept going on and on until, in the end, he said, "The answer is pointers." I almost face-palmed through my face and into the wall behind me.

I think the interviewer was pretty junior and had just finished his internship, judging from what he thought were tough questions and the way he spoke. Overall, it was a very negative experience because, even though the questions were quite easy, the interviewer made it very difficult.

There is no way this kind of "watch over your shoulder" interview process leads to finding quality engineers. You either need to start here as an intern, or you need to code really quickly under pressure and be very prepared for the exact question they will ask. Good luck with that, Arista.

Strings, linked lists, structures, etc.