The phone interview included using Google Docs as an electronic whiteboard. I had to write a JavaScript function and some pseudocode for a simple algorithm, which went well.

The onsite interview was the opposite, except for the nice HR person who sounded supportive and encouraging. She reminded me to talk about order of complexity for each piece of code. There were six interviews, each 45 minutes long.

• First interview: I was asked to write a recursive function to print all possible words from the characters the user typed. It was simple enough, but I missed one step and did not have enough time to recover.
• Second interview: This was another programming exercise, and I nailed it.
• Third interview: This was more about doing dynamic layouts using CSS and how different browsers render them.
• Fourth interview: The interviewer was supposed to be the hiring manager. He took me to the cafeteria to get food and led me to our meeting room, which had been hijacked by another group. We found another room, but it was half-filled with broken furniture, which was not very appetizing. To top it off, he was busy looking at his cell phone and told me to just eat! I ate quickly and tried to engage him in conversation, but was not very successful.
• Fifth interview: The interviewer told me he was a substitute, as his boss was pulled off at the last minute. He was clearly not prepared and spent the entire time asking me how to improve web page performance, his specialty, which meant there was no way I could impress him.

By this time, I was so discouraged that I just wanted to go home.

Browsers running JavaScript are single-threaded. How can we make AJAX calls in the background?