First, they came to my school (Columbia Uni) to conduct one-on-one interviews for selected students. It was a 30-minute interview. They started by asking the usual behavioral questions and tried to understand my specific programming background. Then they went down to the specifics by asking some tech questions. After that was the on-site interview, which was much more tech-focused. Amongst the problems I solved were:

• They asked me to implement a function that checked if a number equals its reverse (e.g., 253 != 352). If it isn't, my function adds the number to itself and checks again.
• They then asked me to read a file that has ice-cream flavors on each line and return the top 10 appearing flavors.

How would you write an algorithm to find the solution to a maze?

Implement a dictionary that returns a word search in O(1) time.