I was initially contacted by a recruiter who set up a telephonic interview. The telephonic interview was very confusing because the interviewer had an accent, making it difficult to understand the questions and respond. I was surprised to receive a call for an onsite interview. The position was in Austin, but my onsite interview was in Durham, NC. The team was split between Austin and North Carolina.

I was provided with a nice hotel very close to the interview location. The stay and travel arrangements were excellent. The next morning, the interview started at 9:00 AM. There were six rounds of one-on-one technical interviews. The interviews were led by a director, followed by his team members. The transitions between interviews were smooth, with one interviewer leading me to another's cubicle. I felt they could have saved time by scheduling the interviews in the same room. The surprise came when they conducted a Skype interview with two Austin team members from Durham.

Coming to the questions:

• There were many questions about my experience, my current role, and whether I was a team player or a sole contributor.
• Whiteboarding exercises included aligned_malloc in C and bit manipulations. I was asked to write a simple program to identify a power of 2.
• Questions covered test plans, test flows, test procedures, and testing harnesses.
• OS and kernel concepts were explored. The interviewer delved into many device driver and process management questions, which I felt I didn't handle well. Topics included scheduling, process management, file management, daemons, IPC communications, and signal handling.
• Whiteboarding involved a circular linked list program and a multithreading implementation algorithm.

At the end of the day, I felt exhausted and disappointed, knowing I hadn't excelled in what I considered important rounds. I felt the OS and kernel concepts round was particularly critical, and I lost my way during that interview.

In hindsight, I believe it was good that I didn't perform well, as I didn't like the coordination between the Austin and NC teams. The answers provided regarding team interactions and sync-up meetings were not convincing. Furthermore, it appeared that key decision-makers were missing from the Austin site.

I didn't hear back from the recruiter for a week. I called her to check on my result. One observation: it's always better to wait for a response. I've heard that companies sometimes keep candidates on hold if their performance is borderline. If they don't find better candidates, they may reconsider borderline cases. Henceforth, I will wait at least three weeks after an interview before inquiring about a response.

Linux File & Process Management

Java Multithreading Questions