A recruiter reached out to me and set up a call with the director of this team.

I had a good discussion, and we moved on to a take-home assignment.

After a couple of iterations, I was OK'd and was invited on-site.

There were 7 rounds in total, each 40-45 minutes. The team was fantastic to talk to. I loved having productive discussions rather than being an anxious interviewee sitting on the opposite end of the table dodging fires!

I enjoyed all the traditional networking, multithreading, data structures, and algorithm challenges. I did pretty well on most of them except for a couple of rounds. I knew I wouldn't make the cut.

It was fine; I knew I could get better and I definitely will one day!

I had a small ray of hope that I would still get the offer since the director had liked my solution from the take-home assignment and he did find some of my background and projects impressive, feeling I could fit in well. Maybe another day!

Take-home question: Design and implement a UDP client-server application that takes strings from a file and sends them to the server. The server will discard the longest 10% of the strings.

On-site questions:

1. Write a circular buffer using a FIFO queue.

2. Given a dictionary (e.g., {"cat", "dog"}) and an input source string, check if the source string can be formed as a concatenation of the strings in the dictionary. Check the case of {"ca", "cat", "dog", "cadog"} for "catdog", etc.

3. Given a list of left and right shoe size arrays, return the count of mismatched shoes. left = {3, 5, 7, 9} right = {5, 7, 5, 9}

4. Producer-consumer problem: Use q.push(i) 100 times in main(), and have two threads, t1 and t2, pop from the queue and print the values in parallel (no strict order).