The interviewer who first screened me over the phone was good. His questions were basically to determine whether it was worth proceeding to a personal screening.

I am happy with how that initial call went. However, I had applied for a Software Engineer (SW) position after working in SW development within the data/storage networking hardware (HW) business for over 15 years. I expected a decent interview where my experience would be respected, and I am disappointed that it was not.

The questions asked by almost every member of the panel—one after another by around four engineers—were more relevant for fresh graduates. I am listing all the questions here for the benefit of fresh graduates (who knows, maybe they will be hired directly as senior engineers due to their exceptional ability in answering them all).

If more than half of the interview consists of these graduate-level questions, why they have to call candidates for an interview in the first place is something I am not able to figure out. Perhaps I would have gone through some graduate books had I known this.

Write a function to copy a NULL-terminated string. The source and destination can be anywhere, with overlap possible. The end result should be that the destination has the string properly without getting corrupted.

What is the difference between a binary tree and a binary search tree? Can you take a set of numbers and build the tree on the board?

Given two nodes in the binary tree above, write code to determine the lowest common ancestor. Also, write code to traverse all the nodes in the tree in order.

Implement the strstr function. The manual page of the strstr function is here.

Write a function that reverses a linked list. Are there any other methods possible? List all methods that you can come up with and explain the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Explain the entire system up sequence for a UNIX system, starting from power-up to getting the login prompt. Explain as much as you know.