The HR contacted me via email after seeing my LinkedIn profile. I had two phone interviews, which were basically asking about my resume and experience. A few programming questions were also asked.

For example, one question was to explain an algorithm to show if a given set of strings is a subset of another set of strings. What is its O(n)?

After passing the two phone interviews, I was invited for an on-site interview. The interview was really good. The interviewers were very kind and made me feel comfortable. The interview lasted for 5 hours, and 6 people interviewed me (one was HR).

Here are some of the interview questions:

1. a) Print each character in reverse order. Example: Input: "I just finished my lunch" Output: "hcnul ym dehsinif tsuj I" b) Reverse each word in the sentence. Output: "lunch my finished just I"

2. Reverse all the bits in a 32-bit integer.

3. A question on merge sort. It was a little complicated, involving two-processor communication. One processor had a sorted list, and the other also had a sorted list. Write a program to merge the lists in a memory accessible to both processors. (I know my explanation of the question is not clear, but basically, you will have to know how merge sort works.)

4. Why is branching a bad thing for a processor? How does it slow the process down?

5. Given that in a switch statement, there are a very large number of cases (say 10,000), how best can you improve the O(n)? What data structure can you implement and how? FYI, each case statement can be a function. (Switch case statements are also branching.)

6. Implement a 3x3 averaging filter (not considering the center pixel) given an image, width, and height. What is the minimum memory needed to perform this action?

Not too many unexpected questions.