This was probably the most twisted interview I ever had. I applied online and went through several interviews with different teams. Some interviewers were friendly and technically qualified, while others were quite serious, to the point where it was difficult to distinguish their seriousness from arrogance.

You don’t just get interviewed by managers, but also by your future colleagues. Depending on the position or if you're "jump-to-others" (read below), you might find a web programmer asking you – someone who has perhaps spent the last 10 years writing drivers at Intel – what a virtual function is.

First of all, if you're not Chinese or Indian living in Singapore, there's a high probability you won't understand their English properly. As a programmer, if you hear something like, "[something you don’t understand]… virtual… [same here]…. virtual function?", you realize they're asking about virtual functions or how they work, but not the entire sentence.

The interview process is somewhat chaotic, with different people from HR contacting you. You might speak with one person and then receive an email from another. You might start the interview for the position you applied for, let's say C++. If they decide you don't fit that position, you won't hear back for weeks. Then, you might receive another email about a new position, asking if you'd like to continue, and then again and again (this is the "jump-to-others" mentioned above). It seems they are trying to find a candidate who can fill one of their many open positions, whether it's for C++, JavaScript, cloud technologies, etc., by having you go through interviews with different teams and answer the same questions (e.g., about virtual functions) over and over. The Singapore office appears to manage a large number of software products.

If your CV states that Qt is not one of your main skills, why would they interview you for a position that requires it, only to tell you, "Oh, we were looking for someone with Qt experience"? You'll only receive this answer if and when you ask during another position's interview, as they don't send rejections. At the end of the Nth interview, they told me they would inform me of their decision either way, positive or negative. At this point, you can probably figure out if they ever followed up.

There seems to be something wrong with Autodesk's offices in Asia. If you check their open positions, you'll notice there are 70 Software Engineering roles available in Singapore and Shanghai combined, which should be a red flag. If you combine the open positions from a few other IT giants, you'll likely find a smaller number. Apparently, from reading other interview reviews that mention continuous re-organization, firings, and hirings, there must be some truth to this. Most of the questions asked were not technical, which further confirms other reviews and what I've observed. They asked questions like, "What do you do if the new schedule is one week instead of three as decided before?" or "What do you do if you have to take over a project from a team that was just fired?" (moving to other products and using different languages? Why not fire N-1 people and keep the most experienced one in that team to support that software?).

Here are a few questions asked by managers:

1. Will the following compile? "Class something;" The answer is no because "Class" must be lowercase. Obviously, there was more code around that. After I spotted other syntax errors, I awkwardly had to tell them "Class" and "Using" must be lowercase. So, if they stay silent, don't be shy; go ahead and tell them it won't compile unless you remove the quotation marks.

2. What's the value of i after this: i++ + ++i + i++ + ++i print("..", i++ + ++i) i++ + i++ + ++i print("..", i++ + ++i) I'm not kidding. Do they know that this is compiler-dependent and makes no sense to analyze? In any case, solving this or not doesn't mean you're smart or not, nor does it test your problem-solving skills. Not all questions were like these, but there were many bizarre ones, some of which I've never seen or heard before. Obviously, easy questions are better than explaining how a spinlock works or how multi-master bus arbitration works, but after some bizarre questions, they sparked my curiosity to ask them some technical questions.

So, if you're from the USA or elsewhere, the outcome here doesn't look very promising. This is not meant to be a sarcastic review, but honestly, I wonder what's happening. This isn't a small company run by high school students, and all these reviews here are adding to the negative reputation of this office. I think global managers should properly check what's happening in their branch offices. As long as the company works and makes money, they probably don't care.

Good luck.

Basic C++ questions, algorithms, problem-solving, etc.