I was originally contacted by one of their technical recruiters. I'm not on the West Coast, so he asked if I'd be open to relocating for 'the right opportunity.'

I had two rounds of phone screens using Collabedit; they weren't overly difficult. One was more algorithm/data structure oriented, the other involved some core Java threading concepts and basic architectural design.

I apparently did well on the phone screens and was flown out for an on-site interview. Like others have mentioned, it consisted of 5-6 rounds with pairs of interviewers and lunch. For some reason, most of what I'd guess were the 'junior' interviewers didn't show up, though they had been on the schedule, so most of my conversations were one-on-one instead of two-on-one.

The interviews were all technical, except for one with someone who was a manager, which was more of a general 'how would you solve this problem' question that involved whiteboarding a high-level architecture/control flow. The rest of the questions were pretty standard large tech company interview fare, though I was pleasantly surprised that there were a few open-ended design questions for decent-sized systems, and one asking me to explain the architecture of a project I'd been working on. It's nice not to be grilled for six hours about CS minutiae that you will never use day-to-day and to talk about some more real-world problems.

All in all, I had a very positive interview experience, except for with one interviewer. I had choked at one point while trying to write an iterative version of a recursive method I wrote to solve a problem. For the rest of the interview, I felt a little 'off' answering the rest of his questions and felt that there wasn't good communication between the two of us, or I just wasn't asking the right questions for clarification.

He cut the interview short because we'd run out of time, and we grabbed lunch. During lunch, we had a good chat about the company and random other casual topics. As I noticed that the lunch time was wrapping up, I asked if we could circle back to his earlier questions that I had been struggling with because I wanted to understand the problem better and figure out what he was probing for. His response to that was the only mark against the whole interview process I'd give. He said something about answers ending up on Glassdoor and other interview sites and wanting to prevent that.

I didn't feel like that was an appropriate response. Am I more likely to post the answer or problem because I didn't nail it during the interview? If I'd passed his section with flying colors, he wouldn't be asking me not to post anything.

On one hand, I understand his frustration because, having interviewed probably close to 100 applicants over 5-6 years, some of my problems have ended up here on Glassdoor (notice that I haven't posted any problem specifics; sorry, memorizers). On the other hand, it's usually easy to tell if someone has prior knowledge of the problem and to throw some twists in to change things up. Being interested in the problems he'd presented, I just wanted to find out if I wasn't understanding the problem, the communication wasn't good, or something else.

After flying home, I didn't think I'd be getting an offer from them since I'd choked on one section of the interview. A few days later, I heard back from the recruiter that the initial feedback from the interview team had been good, which surprised me a bit. I received an offer from them shortly afterward.

The whole process from initial contact to final offer took almost three months, but I wasn't actively looking for a new opportunity and wasn't in a hurry because I had a cross-country move and a lot of baggage to shed before starting with them.

Write an iterative version of a recursive function. Yes, it sounds basic. And yes, it's easy to do for many problems (tree walking, Fibonacci series, etc.). This wasn't one of the straightforward cases.