I applied through the New Graduate program, and a recruiter contacted me within a week. I was scheduled for two back-to-back phone interviews on the same day. For preparation, I used Glassdoor, Steve Yegge's blogs, and a couple of other resources, along with reviewing my college data structures course material.

Before my first interview, I was quite nervous, which didn't help later on. The interviewer started with some questions about my prior experience. Then, he gave me a programming question: Find the maximum consecutive sum of integers in an array. For example, if I have an array A = [-1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 0], the sum is 15. However, for A = [-1, 2, 4, -5, 10, -1], the sum is 16.

I asked the interviewer if I could try out a few examples on paper, but he insisted that everything should be done in Google Docs, which was tough for me as I'm more of a "design through examples" person. My mistake was starting to churn out code without properly thinking through the solution and testing it against a few examples. My first solution didn't work. My second mistake was totally switching my approach from iterative to recursive, which didn't turn out well. In the end, I couldn't solve it in time, and more importantly, my process for the solution was quite embarrassing. By the end of the interview, I knew I had screwed up my chance.

For the second phone interview, which was 10 minutes after the first, I was quite relaxed for some reason. The interviewer was also very friendly. He asked me some basic questions about my experience along with some questions about hash tables and OS concepts. For the programming part, he asked me to implement an iterator class for a list of lists. The idea was to give the user a seamless experience for iteration while keeping track of multiple lists, which may even be empty. I was able to complete and test this class easily, though the interviewer did point out a couple of syntax errors (wrong naming convention for Java functions).

Though the second interview went well, I didn't do well at all in the first. After a month of waiting, I got the dreaded but expected call that I didn't make it to the next round. I wonder what took them so long to decide.

Write a function to get the maximum consecutive sum of integers from an array.

Implement an iterator for a list of lists, which may contain empty lists.