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Software Engineer Interview Experience

March 1, 2012
Neutral ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I applied online and got in touch with a recruiter.

She sent a skills test, which I passed. The skills test consisted of four questions: two coding questions and two debugging questions.

After the skills test, I was contacted by a member of the team I would be working with. We had a 5-10 minute conversation (phone interview) related to the position, followed by a problem-solving section.

One of the problems was to find the longest substring match in a system that can accept only one character at a time. The second problem was based on linked lists and involved deleting an element that was currently pointed to, without the help of any head or tail pointer.

I passed this round, but the result came in after two weeks.

After that, I was contacted by another senior member of the team. However, it seemed that he was not interested in me. He asked general, open-ended questions but did not seem to listen to my answers or engage in the conversation.

I received a rejection two weeks after this second phone interview.

Questions

Skills Test Question:

What is the output from this code (assume int is 32-bit)?

c int f(int n) { return n * f(n-1); }

print(f(100));

I have signed an NDA, so I cannot give any further questions. However, most of them are listed in the PayPal interviews here, and one guideline I will give is to get up to date with your Linux commands too.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 304 interview experiences for the PayPal Software Engineer role.

Success Rate

26%
Pass Rate

PayPal's interview process for their Software Engineer roles is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive53%
Neutral24%
Negative22%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for PayPal's Software Engineer interview process.

PayPal Work Experiences