I had applied to Intel several times since December 2010 and finally received an email requesting a phone interview on June 13, 2011. The interviewer (I'll call him X) called right on time. He began by describing his position and job profile at Intel's Folsom office. Then, he provided a description of the job and its requirements and qualifications. He then asked about my availability date and if I was ready to relocate. All this took close to 15 minutes. Now for the actual interview questions. Many questions were asked, and most of them were quite simple.

1. How do you ensure a program runs on both Windows and Linux? Answer: I couldn't answer this one. I was thinking in a completely different direction. Use ifdef for win32 in the preprocessor directives.

2. Asked if I knew the difference between release builds and debug builds. I hadn't, and he explained it to me.

3. If you can't use breakpoints, how do you debug a piece of code? My answer: Print statements (he agreed with my reply; I was surprised).

4. C++ concepts like virtual functions, pure virtual functions, operator overloading, and inline functions.

5. Describe how to swap two numbers. My answer: Use a temporary variable or XOR.

6. Count the number of nodes in a singly linked list. My answer: Just count until next points to NULL.

7. What data structure would you use to store a directory? I said a binary tree or BST. He suggested a hash map. He had mentioned there would be random inserts and deletes, which I kind of overlooked while thinking about the question. I said BST since I thought directory data would be sorted.

8. Count the number of set bits in a given integer. My answer: Use & with 1, then divide by 2 or right shift.

9. How do you handle segfaults? My answer: I said I use GDB or Valgrind. He said Valgrind is often used for memory leaks. He then asked if I knew what memory leaks are, and I told him, "Basically, we assign some memory using new and never delete it, even after the program is over."

I think there were a few other questions, but I can't seem to recall all of them!

Data structure to use to represent a directory.

How to ensure that a program works across various compilers without any errors.