I spoke with an engineer at a university career fair. He was interested in the work I had done.

The next day, I received a call from the recruiter during a lecture, so I couldn't take the call. I called back an hour later and left a voicemail. I didn't get a call back. I continued calling back and leaving voicemails for a week but received no response.

Apparently, TripAdvisor follows this approach when recruiting from career fairs: if you take the recruiter's call when they contact you, you get an interview; otherwise, you don't. I became irritated at this irrational method and emailed the careers team through the email address found on their website. I received an email from the recruiter (whose call I had missed) within the hour, asking to schedule an interview.

First phone interview: This was an hour of collaborative coding on a shared screen with a senior engineer. The engineer called 45 minutes late. I got through the interview and was scheduled for an onsite interview.

Onsite interview: This consisted of four interviews (one coding, two algorithmic, and one design) plus lunch with the hiring manager.

Two interviewers were extremely friendly and nice.

One interviewer (in the algorithmic round) had quite a chip on his shoulder. My solution missed one corner edge case. He pointed that out and walked out of the room (without saying goodbye), wearing an expression that conveyed, 'How could you possibly miss that?'

The hiring manager was awkward and uncomfortable.

The design round was really simple, but I had no idea if my solution was what they were expecting, as the manager kept saying 'ok' while wearing a very confused expression.

I wouldn't have taken the offer if I had been offered one.

Phone:

• Fibonacci number (recursive and iterative)
• Remove duplicates from an array
• Resume

Onsite:

• Divide a number by 2 bitwise
• 2D array question
• LCA of 2 nodes in a binary tree
• Design a schema for a web application