The process took about a week.

First, there was a phone interview where we went over some parts of my resume relevant to the position. I was asked some technical questions: commonly used data structures, differences between an array and a linked list, how to build a linked list, and questions about the grep command.

After that, we had a shared workspace session online where I had to code two very simple programs in JavaScript. A second-year computer science student should have no problem coding them. All together, this part took about 50 minutes.

I was invited to an on-site interview at FlipKey's office. The office space is a well-renovated factory building; modern and very well designed. It's an open concept with a lot of space and light. I was impressed.

The interview was Google-style: four one-hour individual whiteboard interviews with different team leads. Each interviewer had some questions about my past job experience and then presented a problem or two to solve on a whiteboard.

Some problems:

• Write a program that character-reverses an ASCII file.
• Write an atoi function.
• Given a non-typical tree structure, split nodes into groups by weight. Things to review: Sets, Lists, Tree Traversal, Greedy Algorithm, Knapsack problem.
• A few other problems where knowledge of standard algorithms and data structures is required.

Overall, the interview experience was good. From what I saw and learned about the company, I would have liked working there.

I had one major complaint: I didn't realize ahead of time how long the interview process was. The interview stretched well over the lunch hour, and by the end, I was exhausted and passing out from hunger. I felt it was inconsiderate of FlipKey to not offer me lunch or at least a break between interviews, considering I mentioned a few times that I was hungry. This was especially true considering that the whole company was having catered lunch that day. When I asked for coffee, they actually walked me by the lunch trays. In retrospect, I should have gotten over my shyness and asked them to give me lunch. Being burned out and having low blood sugar definitely took a big hit on my performance.

Write an atoi function