I usually like to be prepared for my on-site interviews by reading Glassdoor beforehand, but it turns out I should have looked more carefully even before the phone screen, as I was blasted out of the water by relatively elementary questions. Hopefully, you can avoid the embarrassment I experienced and be somewhat better prepared.

TripAdvisor is looking for mobile engineers. The immediate takeaway I got from Dan, the hiring manager, is that if you have any specialty (e.g., Android, iOS, RoR, backend, etc.), you'll be expected to work in everything else as well, not necessarily just your specialty. This may be good for folks looking for broad experience, but not so good for a developer looking to sharpen or go very deep on one particular platform.

They also talked about one-week sprints, which seems like a lot of pressure for potentially larger tasks. TripAdvisor also doesn't have architects, which kind of explains why their current mobile offerings are a bit of a user-unfriendly, haphazard mess.

Around this point, I started getting peppered with general computer science questions, which weren't the platform-specific questions I had been expecting. Expect to get grilled on:

• Big-O/Little-O complexity
• Hash tables
• Trees
• Sorting algorithms

These are all things that grad students think about regularly, but not necessarily things application engineers who are more focused on getting apps implemented consider.

As much as I like the concept of TripAdvisor and its (equally clunky) website, I was pretty well shaken up by the experience of talking with the hiring manager enough to know that this wouldn't be a place where a mobile engineer could be inspired to focus and do their best work.

Implement a LinkedList in your language of choice.

For me, it was Objective-C. The hiring manager typed the following into a shared whiteboard/document browser window:

objectivec LList *list = [[LList alloc] init]; [list insert:10]; [list insert:20]; [list insert:5]; [list insert:30]; [list insert:12];