I received an invitation to answer two programming questions on HackerRank.

The total time to complete the problems was two hours, which is plenty of time if you don't have major bugs in your code.

Both problems pretty much required good selection and implementation of data structure algorithms and recursion. I completed the exercise in about an hour and a half because I encountered a bug that took me a while to figure out.

The on-site interview is actually easier than the problems I did on HackerRank. The on-site interview consisted of three parts:

• Algorithms
• Architecture (e.g., distributed and parallel algorithms)
• Test-driven development

It was my first interview in a while, so I messed up undergrad-level CS questions.

After interacting with the interviewers and going out on a lunch social, I realized it wasn't going to be a great place for me to work, but that is just personal taste.

For the architecture question, Conway's Game of Life algorithm was considered. I was asked to write pseudocode for tackling this problem at a micro-level (e.g., one machine) and a large-scale level (e.g., a distributed system).