An onsite interview followed a technical phone screen. The interview consisted of four technical sessions, each conducted by two engineers, and lunch with the hiring manager.

For two of the technical sessions, one of the engineers was remote, dialing in through a Cisco meeting system and pointing the camera at the whiteboard.

Technical questions were challenging, but it felt like a collaborative experience. Two sessions involved coding, one was an object/system design exercise, and another was a debugging/code-reviewing exercise.

Most of the interviewers seemed friendly and technically strong. The remote interviewer setup was a little unusual for whiteboard coding, but the system worked out.

Part of the N-queens question: given an N x N chess board with N queens already positioned on it, write a function to tell whether the queens are "safe" from each other or not.

Using C or C++ specifically, deallocate an entire binary tree without using recursion or any external data structures like stacks, queues, or arrays. You can use local variables/pointers.

Object/system design: design a car rental service.

Code-review a few pages of code (printed out, thankfully with colored syntax highlighting). The interviewers step out of the room for 10 minutes or so and let you mark it up by hand. When they come back, you have a discussion about your comments and questions.