Got in contact with a GE recruiter through an on-campus career fair. I spoke with the recruiter about the work I had done, basically pitching my experience and projects. The recruiter mentioned that he had an opening that matched my experience, and he scheduled me for an interview.

The 2-part interview process consisted of an in-person behavioral interview followed by a technical screen over the phone by an engineer on the team I would be working with. Both took around 90 minutes.

The behavioral interview was actually a pretty nice experience. The person interviewing me didn't go for the 'standard' HR questions and instead we just talked for a while about relevant coursework and personal projects. He did open a few times with "tell me about a project in which ....blah blah," but it progressed naturally into an open dialogue. Following this phase, I was scheduled for a technical screen.

I was contacted by a GE engineer, and we set up a time that worked for both of us. For the next hour and a half, I was grilled on the full spectrum of computer systems and software. The questions were generally more on the conceptual side, ranging in scope from straightforward to fairly in-depth. The interviewer did mention that he was asking questions intended for a full-time hire, and not to sweat out any incorrect answers. Below are a few questions I was asked:

• Explain the Linux driver model, and how you would go about developing your own.
• Walk me through the process of modifying an interrupt service routine in the Windows kernel.
• Walk me through the general prologue and epilogue of a generic interrupt service routine.
• What keyword in C would you use to indicate a variable will be modified outside of the local scope?
• Let's say we have Host A and Host B on a LAN, both without established ARP entries. What happens when Host A pings Host B? (Wanted details on ARP discovery, IP address resolution, pertinent Wireshark commands, etc)
• What is the stack used for, versus the heap?
• What is real-time computing?
• Tell me everything you know about process schedulers. (I hadn't touched scheduling in depth, so I talked about Linux CPU governors and he seemed happy with that)

Following the technical screening (I'd say I got around 85% of his questions right), they presented an offer letter.

What is a stack overflow? (This question wasn't surprising) Can you tell me about the overflow vulnerability inherent in the printf() function? (Hello question, out of left field!)