I applied on the corporate website. A couple of months went by, and I was eventually contacted by one of their corporate recruiters. She wanted to discuss a different position (QA), which I was not interested in. She was kind enough to hear what I would be interested in instead and referred me to another corporate recruiter.

This second corporate recruiter reached out to me the next day for a phone call. He told me a lot about the company on a high level, then described their hiring process briefly. He didn't ask any technical questions, only questions about my technical background and interests. He set up a phone interview with one of the hiring managers, a Senior Manager of Software Engineering, for the very next day.

The phone interview with the engineering manager went well. There was no deep technical evaluation, mostly questions about my experience and specific technical knowledge. These were mostly high-level questions, such as why I would choose one database platform over another, or why I would choose one programming language/framework over another. He then asked a rudimentary question about the order of construction when instantiating a subclass C whose parent is B, whose parent is A. He then asked similar questions about destruction order and "why" things work that way. It was easy. At the end of the call, I was told I would probably be invited on-site.

The corporate recruiter I had been working with was very communicative, unlike most recruiters I have worked with. Over the next couple of days as I awaited a formal on-site invite, he kept me posted about the progress and any delays. In the end, I received my invite after only 3 days. I received a call from an Interview Coordinator on a Tuesday who set up the on-site session for the following Friday. On Wednesday, I received a formal email-invitation from the Coordinator with information on Intuit, the agenda, and directions to the office in San Diego. Shortly thereafter, the corporate recruiter sent me an email describing what the interview environment would be like so that I'd be best prepared. He gave me the rundown of what to expect that day; he was very gracious. He also passed along an online skills test to take any time before the on-site. It consisted of 4 multiple-choice questions and 2 problem-solving questions, which were moderately easy.

Friday arrived, and I met first with the recruiter, who gave me a tour of the beautiful campus, followed by a few minutes to chat before the technical interviews. The technical interview began with the same Senior Manager who did my phone screen, along with a Principal Engineer. They had asked me to prepare a presentation of my 2-3 coolest accomplishments. I had some good ones, so I spoke for 25 minutes with a PowerPoint presentation. Then came the technical questions: 3 in all.

• The first one, I stumbled through but reached a solution in the end with some hints along the way.
• For the second one, I was told, "don't worry if you don't get the solution, this is just to see thought process. Bonus if you get it." I absolutely nailed that one.
• The third one had the same outcome as the first question.

Then, they left a lot of time for me to ask questions. They even canceled a meeting to allow me to stay longer to get my questions out.

Afterward, the recruiter escorted me out. He told me I'd hear back by Monday (1 business day). Indeed I did; they felt my problem-solving skills were not aligned with the role they wanted to fill. I respectfully disagree, but I understand where they are coming from.

At the end of the day, I was treated with nothing but respect by everyone along the way, and they gave me every opportunity to succeed. I merely fumbled the ball during the interview process, as they presented me with questions that I probably could have solved without hints in a less time-constrained environment with less pressure. But that's interviews for you. No excuses.

The only small oddity is that the people who interviewed me didn't even have any idea that I had taken the online skills tests (and therefore didn't even know my results), despite the fact that I was told "everyone has to take this." It was no big deal.

All questions were around problem-solving with algorithms.

First question, the interviewer insisted I write it on the whiteboard, syntactically correct (in Java).

Given time constraints and the pressure (yeah, I know, those were both my problems, not theirs), I wrote out an O(n^2) solution fairly quickly, although it took a lot of time to write compile-ready code on the whiteboard.

By the time that was done, too much time had lapsed, so the interviewer started giving me hints, asking if I could rewrite it for O(log n) or O(n).

I got there eventually, but the interviewer literally said, "In the interest of time, here are some hints..."

Certainly, with more than a couple of minutes, I could have come up with an O(n) solution on my own. The question was only moderately difficult.