The hiring process starts with the HR Recruiter calling you to fix a date and time for the initial phone screen round. The call came at the designated time and it was a technical interview with questions mostly coming from the skills I had listed on my CV. Most of the questions were centered around the UNIX environment, how to run commands on it, and writing shell and Perl scripts. I believe the interviewer was satisfied with the answers I gave, as I answered almost all of them and indicated where I was unable to provide an answer.

Two days later, I was contacted by the HR person again and asked to come for a face-to-face (1:1) interview, which would also be technical. The interviewer started by offering water and coffee or tea. As I declined, we settled into the interview. The environment was very casual, with people walking around in shorts and t-shirts, and all the cubicles were decorated with various personal effects. The interview room had soothing colors, and it felt great just to be there. The atmosphere was vibrant and full of activity.

I would advise people going for similar interviews not to be nervous and to answer questions as they come. Be honest and say no to questions where you do not have an answer. The interviewers are astute and can see through any attempt to bluff your way through without understanding what you are discussing. Be frank about your knowledge and skills, and do not list anything on your CV that you have only heard of or briefly touched upon without sufficient knowledge to discuss it confidently (such as expect scripts, etc.).

Given a dictionary containing all possible anagrams of a word, how would you test it?

What data structure would you use to construct it, and what would be the design of that structure?

How would you kill all processes for user "abc" with the name "xyz", using only a single command on the command line of a UNIX/FreeBSD system? You are allowed to use pipes and sudo commands. The use of killall is not permitted.