I submitted my resume at a campus career fair and heard back a couple of weeks later to schedule an on-campus interview. The on-campus interview was a half hour long and included two questions:

• Given two nodes in a tree, find their lowest common ancestor.
• Given a function that performs bit operations, determine its purpose and identify any bugs.

About two weeks after the on-campus interview, I was informed that I would be moving forward in the interview process. This was a negative aspect of the process for me, as I was asked to interview for a position nowhere near the locations I had specified as my preferred choices. The team I interviewed with also seemed quite different from the interests I had discussed in my campus interview.

The hiring event consisted of four 45-60 minute interviews. Each interview varied slightly. Some of the other candidates received nearly all design questions, while others had mostly coding/algorithm questions. I had a mix of design and coding questions, which were done on a whiteboard.

For all of the coding/algorithm questions, time and space requirements were discussed as the approach was talked through. No specific requirements were given at the start of a question, but the resulting complexities had to be discussed and justified. Some questions related to balancing time and space requirements. Test cases were also discussed for each question, ranging from use cases to catching integer overflow.

The final design question was very open-ended, which I think actually tripped me up a bit because, after several focused technical questions, I had trouble thinking from a broad design point of view.

Overall, I felt the interviews all went well, but with no feedback from the interviewers, I can't say what it was that kept me from getting an offer.

1. Given a non-negative integer array that is then shuffled and one element is removed, find which element was removed.

2. Assume you are designing/writing code for some small business software. How would you go about creating a clean, extensible method for calculating sales tax that can be easily extended to work in different parts of the world?

3. a. Given an integer array, remove the duplicate values and return an integer array. b. Test a dice roll generator method.

4. Design a system for tracking employee applicants through the interview process.