I took a 45-minute phone interview for a C/C++ developer position. The questions were mostly directed at language concepts, such as:

• "What is a static in C/C++?"
• "What is a virtual function?"
• "What is the difference between malloc and new?"

I seemed to do okay on those. There were also some SQL and database design questions, which is odd because I don't really have that in my background. I'm a Linux kernel developer.

Since I have an EE background and not CS, I ran into trouble with the algorithmic part of the interview. I really don't have any experience designing hashing or sorting functions for large amounts of data. Obviously, it was a wrong fit for this position.

I was expecting something more along the lines of Unix/TCP/UDP/IP type questions. The interview never went there.

Design a database to hold authors, books, and multiple authors per book.

What would the tables look like:

Design a sorting algorithm and/or data structure to find all data members from one array that exist in another array.

What would be the time complexity for a large data set or a small data set?