One phone HR interview, followed by two phone technical interviews and then an on-site interview. I did not make it past the first technical phone interview. The overall questions were easy, but the interviewer did not know how to answer questions about his own technical problem.

The technical phone interview was quite simple. It was a basic string parse question: print the output to the screen. You have 60 minutes.

It was an easy question; however, the interviewer called 5 minutes late, then talked about himself for the next 10, and finally dove into the question at the 15-minute mark. You could choose the language; I chose Java.

The interviewer didn't know Java too well, which was fine. My problem came with understanding the question. You have to create your own input, your own tests, and the actual algorithm, which is great. However, when you ask questions to help your understanding of what he wants and his response is "I don't know," that can make for a bad interview.

I spent the next 15 minutes trying to figure out exactly what he wanted, but I had to reword half my questions because he didn't have the answers. For example, I asked how the data was to be presented, and he said he didn't know. Should I store the output or print it to the screen? "I don't know; yeah, I guess you can print it." I mean, come on, my career and future with the company ride on this. How do you not know simple explanation/clarification questions to your own question?

Needless to say, I had a 90% working solution but ran out of time. I never had any hesitation or issues coding it up after I understood the question fully.