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Software Engineer Interview Experience - San Jose, California

May 29, 2014
Positive ExperienceGot Offer

Process

From various on-site interviews, I was asked:

  • Design and implement an iterator for a singly-linked list class.
  • How would you design a garbage collector?
  • Given two connected singly-linked lists (forming a T-shaped structure), find the node where they connect.
  • Implement a complete singly-linked list class in C++.
  • Cycle detection in singly-linked lists.
  • Describe the differences between C++ and Java.
  • Determine if a binary tree is balanced.
  • Describe the architecture of the systems of my current employer.
  • Describe how to maintain data integrity across concurrent reads/writes to/from a database.
  • How to remove duplicates from an array.
  • When does it make sense to store a tree ADT in an array?
  • How would you organize a data structure used for parsing arithmetic operations? (e.g., 3*2 + 4 = 10)
  • Write a Python script to scan files in a directory for a word. Return true if the word is found in at least one file and false otherwise.

Questions

Nothing truly unexpected.

Thorough knowledge of OOP, data structures, and algorithms will serve you well.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 42 interview experiences for the PayPal Software Engineer role in San Jose, California.

Success Rate

36%
Pass Rate

PayPal's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in San Jose, California is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive57%
Neutral21%
Negative21%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for PayPal's Software Engineer interview process in San Jose, California.

PayPal Work Experiences