I applied for an entry-level engineering position online and was contacted pretty quickly by an HR representative. They checked my basic credentials, such as my school and when I could start, and then scheduled two phone interviews with engineers.

I was expecting some of those "Google" questions like "How many ping pong balls can fit in a school bus?" but apparently, they don't ask anything like that anymore. Most of the questions were about algorithms and data structures, so definitely brush up on those.

(Hint: When in doubt, just say you'll use a hash table.)

How can you find a cycle in a singly-linked list (a place where the last node links back to a previous node)?

Given two arrays of integers, return a new array containing only the common elements.

How would you write an algorithm to search across many machines?