So Quatrics is trying really hard to look like Google, and they even say so on their website, "one of our executives used to work for Google..." but trust me, that doesn't mean anything!

I interviewed in the beginning of June for a software engineering position.

It started off with a really easy problem that I had to solve on a whiteboard. Then they moved on to a harder problem, no piece of paper, no time to think, just solve, solve, solve...

When I interviewed for even the crappiest company, I was given time to think through the problem first before writing up a solution. However, at Qualtrics, I had to start solving the problem directly on the whiteboard, which put a lot of stress on me.

Also, after I proposed my first solution, the interviewers didn't agree between each other if my solution was right or not. (Seriously????)

Then it was followed by general questions about my skills in various programming languages, database knowledge, and Linux commands:

• Java
• PHP
• JavaScript
• HTML
• CSS
• MySQL

The person that did one-on-one interview was among the first group that interviewed me. During that one-on-one time, I felt like he was showing real interest in me and was trying to get to know me better. We talked about his experience at the company, his position, and duties. Then he told me that they would send me a set of "homework" problems and that I was to take my time and write my best code.

One of the problems was about building a program that would go through a text and count occurrences of all of the words in it. They asked you to implement it two different ways: one that takes little time programming, and another that would take longer time programming but would have to work faster.

After I submitted my code, I got a response back within a couple of days saying no thanks...

Besides the fact that they are trying to put a lot of stress on you during the first interview at the whiteboard, the programming problems are really easy. Know your data structures, differences between unsigned and signed variables, Linux commands, and web development stuff (DB, PHP, JavaScript, CSS). The last one made no sense to me because I applied for a software development position, not web development.

Write a program that parses the words and counts their occurrences in a text file.

Implement it two different ways:

• One that takes little programming.
• Another that would take longer programming but would work considerably faster.