I applied on the company website and received an email stating they wanted a telephonic interview.

It's a code-sharing tool by HackerRank called "CodePair," where both you and the interviewer share screens, and you can type the code they ask for.

The interviewer showed up 40 minutes late, and I was about to leave the site when my phone rang.

We started with basics: "Tell me about your current job, kind of work, etc."

Question 1: Rate yourself in C++ on a scale of 10. I rated myself a 6 and said it's complex and hard to master.

Questions on C++ included pointers and references, initializer lists, static, const (variables, functions, etc.), copy constructors, and assignment operators. I performed averagely on those questions.

Good question: Given const int p = 10;, change the value of p by hook or by crook. I gave a wrong answer saying:

c++ int *test = &p; test = 50;

(Although this can be done by accessing memory addresses directly using strings and some magic).

Programming questions: You are given an integer, e.g., 10, represented in binary as 1010. Flip the bits (2's complement) to 0101.

First, I tried using the NOT operator directly, then realized that the total number of bits required needed to be considered.

I coded a solution using bool bit[32] and loops. The interviewer said he could see what I was doing and expected a more efficient solution.

I was mostly impressed by their development environment. They use Vi, Emacs, and Linux in development (which I've always wanted in my job), none of the MS garbage. That impressed me, but sadly, I couldn’t impress them.

How does the compiler interpret the const keyword, and how can it be fooled?