The phone interview was mundane and consisted of typical Data Structures and "tell me about your projects" type of questions. One good question was: When does the compiler necessarily not make a function marked inline actually inline?

I was also asked a puzzle.

I was invited for the onsite interview and had my interview scheduled at 12:00 pm. It started at around 12:05 pm. The first few questions were the general "tell me about yourself" and your projects. Then, I was asked about multithreading and problems associated with it, followed by questions on when deadlocks would occur and the difference between Semaphores and Mutexes.

By this time, there were two interviewers: one shadowing and one fairly senior. A third interviewer entered at around 12:13-12:15 pm. Again, I was asked "tell me about yourself," etc. The new interviewer asked me how to find the square root of a number without using the square root function. I knew the solution, but he then asked me to return the closest integer, so I was trying to figure that out. I wrote a little code, and he suddenly said, "That's okay," and asked me to write a test utility function for the sqrt function. This utility would take a number and a possible guess and return whether it's actually the square root of the number. Fair enough, it would just be a simple if-else statement once we had used our sqrt function previously written.

He had this "you are wrong" kind of face on. I was really worried and got all tensed. In hindsight, I guess he just expected me not to use the sqrt function and return true/false using just the utility function. I feel slightly flustered now, mainly because he could have just asked me that. It was neither a trick question nor a question that required a lot of thought.

Next, the senior interviewer asked me how to find if two lists intersect. I explained it to him (the answer is in CareerCup, I guess). I asked if I should write the code, and he told me that wouldn't be needed.

Then, another interviewer asked me about string compression, specifically a simpler version: aaabbbaacc would be a3b3a2c2. That was simple. I told him how I could do it. In hindsight, I feel I should have given an in-place solution (not a big deal, just required him to ask me a couple of questions on it or clarify if a more space-efficient code was possible). Again, I asked him if I should write the code, and he said no.

The time was 12:52 pm. The interviewer who came in late wrapped up the interview, stating it was almost time. I said we could go back to the sqrt function and figure out if the solution I gave would work with a few tweaks (it would work).

Then they asked me if I had any questions for them, etc. At 12:56 pm, they wrapped up the interview and asked me to wait in the room. Fifteen minutes later, the recruiter came in and told me that they wouldn't continue with the interview. I felt shattered; I did not expect it at all. I did answer their questions.

What was depressing was that they judged my performance on a single round of interview. I would have been okay if I had actually performed badly, but my performance definitely warranted at least another round to judge me. It was surely not so off-mark that I had to be sent off immediately.

Definitely, this was one of the worst interviews I've faced, mainly because their perception of you is that you are a bad candidate, and the interview is focused on assuring themselves that you are indeed bad rather than trying to get the best out of you, assuming you are actually good.

Another evident problem I could see was that they just don't care. Why? Because the interviews are basically general. Once you've finished your training, you need to again find a team that is willing to accept you. Since the interviews are general, and they know that you may or may not be a part of their team, they don't care about losing you.

The "I don't care" attitude was so evident when I saw the guy come in late, and he yawned in between the interview.

The post probably makes you feel that I may be a sore loser trying to vent my opinions here. I can assure you I am not. I've gotten over the interview and just wanted to give you guys a big heads-up for your interviews.