I contacted a recruiter and asked about applying.

The first phone interview consisted of high-level questions, including:

• Why are calls to virtual functions slower?
• How would you find the maximum occurrence of a word in a huge file (without coding, just a high-level explanation)?
• What is the factory pattern?

And similar questions.

The second phone interview was purely a coding exercise involving one long, but easy, problem: Write code to verify a Sudoku board.

First Person's Interview:

This interview featured high-level questions about achieving certain tasks, such as:

• How would you write a pancake sort routine?
• You have a network of friends (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook). How would you keep track of all the people you are connected to?
• What is the runtime of the A* search (mentioned because I had brought it up earlier)?

Second Person's Interview:

• Write code to find duplicates in a linked list.
• How would you synchronize a linked list across multiple computers? If nodes are added or removed on one computer, all others must reflect the change. Concurrency must be accounted for.

Third Person's Interview:

Given a 2D array (NxN), write code to print it in a snake pattern. For example, if the array is:

1, 2, 3 4, 5, 6 7, 8, 9

The routine should print: 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 8, 7, 4, 5.

The final question involved how to write a connection pool (a class that returns connections to the user and accepts them back when the user is done).

Given a set-top box with the following layout:

a, b, c, d, e f, g, h, i, j k, l, m, n, o p, q, r, s, t u, v, w, x, y z

Write code to generate the character sequence for a given word. For example, if the word is "CON", the function should print the following sequence of directional movements:

Right (now at B) Right (now at C) OK (to select C) Down Down Right Right OK (to select O) Left (now at N) OK (to select N)

Note: Be careful when at 'Z.' Moving right will get you stuck.

Afterwards, the interviewer added a space to the right of 'Z' to test the code.

Write a routine that performs a Secret Santa assignment in O(N) time.