I applied through a referral.

I had one Skype interview (two were scheduled, but I didn't make it past the first one).

The interviewer briefly introduced himself and asked me a coding question straight away. I chose to use Java.

There were no behavioral questions, just one coding question. Contrary to what most people have said, I got an interviewer who wasn't very friendly. He was there to do his job, plain and simple.

Before I get to the question, I just want to say that the interviewer had a very thick accent (I'm an international candidate, by the way), and that made it really difficult for me to understand what he wanted me to do. This isn't me being bitter; I'm saying this to present a very honest opinion about my interview.

That being said, the question wasn't something that can be found online or in most books. I was given two functions: String recv() and String ReadLine() (both of these do not take arguments).

recv() generates some string (Example: "123\n45\n6789").

ReadLine() should read the string being returned by recv() and print all characters until the first '\n'. After that, it should read the recv() string again and print the next characters until the second '\n'.

Example: recv(): "123\n45\n6789" ReadLine(): "123" // first call of ReadLine ReadLine(): "45" // second call of ReadLine

However, the next sequence now doesn't have a '\n'. So, once the end of the string is hit, the ReadLine() function must call recv() again and append all characters until it reads a '\n'.

Continuing the above example: ReadLine(): "6789abcde" // third call of ReadLine recv(): "abc" // still no '\n'...

So you must call recv() again: recv(): "de\n"

The commented sections are my explanations (the interviewer didn't give any such things). I've explained the problem as clearly as I can. Unfortunately, the interviewer kept overwriting his examples, and (I have to emphasize this) his accent made it really hard to understand just what he wanted out of this program.