For the first phone interview, I didn't receive the call. The recruiter then scheduled another one for me. The phone interview took an hour. The compiling function of the online coding tool went down, so I had to talk through my code with the interviewer. However, I had a feeling that while I was explaining my answers, the interviewer was doing other things. I had to wait a long time for his response, and I even asked if he was still there. Almost at the end of the interview, the interviewer seemed to have finished his tasks and asked if I had any questions for him. He then answered my questions patiently.

I received the onsite interview invitation the following Monday.

They had a travel agent help me book my ticket and flight and hotel. However, they explained that since the non-stop air ticket was too expensive, they had to book me a one-stop flight. It is only 1 hour and 40 minutes from my city to New York, but since I had to stop in another airport and the first flight was delayed, which made me miss my connecting flight, it took me 9 hours to get to New York the day before the interview. When I went back, the same thing happened. I would suggest they book a Greyhound ticket for candidates next time. When I finally arrived at LGA airport, the taxi they had arranged took me to the wrong hotel. Luckily, the wrong hotel was closer to their headquarters, and I decided to stay there.

On the interview day, I only survived two rounds.

The first round:

• Signal processing questions on my resume. What are LDPC and FFT?
• Return the index of the largest and second-largest number in a given array.
• Return the occurrence of each letter of a given string in alphabetical order.
• If a person is standing in the middle of a railway and a train is approaching from an unknown distance, with two stations 300m and 500m away in opposite directions, they must decide which way to run.

The second round:

• Best time to buy and sell stock.
• Brain teaser: Two robots with the same program must meet each other without knowing their locations and with no communication. Solve this in both 1D and 2D.
• Two linked lists are joined together; find the node where they first meet. What if another list points to one of them? How to find the point where the two lists merge?

To sum up, the building was very nice, but the travel experience was unpleasant.