After I had a phone screen with the hiring manager, I was invited to an on-site interview with 5 different developers, one at a time, each for 30 minutes. I spent most of my time coding on a whiteboard and answering core Java questions.

Overall, I felt that the interview went well. It could have gone a lot better, but I was completely flustered by the second person who interviewed me (Interviewer B).

My confusion was caused by Interviewer B refusing to accept my answer to his 'reverse a string' question (without using StringBuilder). Below is the method that I drew up:

java String reverse(String str) { char[] in = str.toCharArray(); for (int i = 0; i < str.length() / 2; i++) { char temp = in[str.length() - 1 - i]; in[str.length() - 1 - i] = in[i]; in[i] = temp; } return new String(in); }

When I finished, he kept asking me if I could find an issue with my code. I couldn't seem to find anything wrong, so I walked him through the program line by line and still couldn't find an issue. Interviewer B then told me that my index was off by one and I was not retrieving the last value of the char array. After attempting to argue that I was not off by one, he began to chuckle at me and insist that I was incorrect. By this point, I was muddled and gave in. I updated a couple lines of the method to be:

java char temp = in[str.length() - i]; in[str.length() - i] = in[i];

And then he accepted my answer. I thought those changes would have caused a StackOverflowError, but I just assumed it was correct somehow.

So I met with the next interviewer (Interviewer C). After some core Java questions, he told me to report to the whiteboard and asked the last question I wanted to hear: "Write a method to reverse a String." So I coded it to exactly what Interviewer B accepted. In my head, I knew it was wrong, but I felt that maybe things worked differently at Comcast. Interviewer C immediately told me that it was a StackOverflowError. I adjusted my code to my original solution, and he accepted it.

In hindsight, I wish that I would have stuck to what I believed was correct and should have asked the interviewer to run the program on his laptop instead of trusting him. Because of what happened, I felt that the interview was very unfair.

Explain how hashCode works in a HashMap.

FizzBuzz