Attended the interview today!

Knew in advance that for them, experience level does not matter. So, I prepared data structures and algorithms for a week.

Initial round: Phone interview (30 min): Asked basic details about my work, then suddenly data structure questions.

• Find the median from a continuously changing stream of data.
• Find the 2nd maximum in an array.
• Find the nth largest in an array.

Called for a face-to-face discussion. All 3 technical and one hiring manager rounds consisted of only data structures.

No one asked anything in Java, though I was called for a Java requirement. Don't know why there was so much concentration on data structures only.

Also, I feel my skills were not matching, as they wanted someone who had worked on PHP and Perl.

Honestly, I was not expecting a negative reply, but I guess my 2nd technical round and skills impacted my interview.

At the end, I feel that if you want to go to Yahoo, then study like a fresher preparing for your first job. Experience level doesn't matter.

1. Write a merge function to merge 2 arrays into a single array.

2. Find the length of a linked list loop.

3. How to get the values of two elements from an array whose sum is N.

2nd round:

1. Get the nth largest/smallest from a BST.

2. How will you remove duplicate paragraphs from a big file? (Told hashmap, asked me to write hashcode :-( )

3. Perform a merge of multiple arrays (k-way merge). (Thought for some time, but could not tell. :-( )

3rd round:

1. Middle of a linked list.

2. Sum in a binary search tree.

3. Some Unix questions.

4. How will you design Google Maps or Yahoo Maps?

4th round:

Puzzle on 25 horses.