As a senior at Berkeley I was interviewed for a position originally advertised for Epocrates.

At the time Epocrates was undergoing a transitionary phase. First I was interviewed by two engineers in person at Berkeley's career center office. I was asked two technical questions over thirty minutes and then later was told I did quite well and that I would hear from them shortly for a followup. About 3 weeks later I got an email saying they wanted to interview me on site. So I took BART and Caltrain to their offices (a pretty significant walk since they did not pick me up from the station) for a 3 hour interview with 3 different employees. I was shown the offices; it was very quiet and actually quite depressing. I heard back from them a month later asking me to schedule another interview on site. When I asked why I was being interviewed again (the email sounded rather odd) the HR person admitted that my application had been lost. It was another week before I heard from them again and by then I had written the company off as a complete waste of time.

I was asked to write a program that could provide several characteristics of a sequence determined by juggling a set of balls. For example, at time t=0 toss a ball from the left hand l that takes 3 seconds to arrive in the other hand, at t=2 toss a ball from the left hand that takes 4 seconds to arrive, etc.

I was asked to determine whether a given sequence of steps was repeatable infinitely and to determine the cycle length if so, among a few other characteristics.