Very important: I had two interviews for two separate positions. In one, I was interviewed by random people, and in the other, I was interviewed by my future team members. Guess which one gave an offer? The one where team members did the interview.

My phone interview consisted mostly of Java core questions and possibly some threading. I was interviewed by my future manager.

On-site, I was interviewed by many people:

• Javascript: language knowledge, and I think I solved a problem.
• Java: language knowledge, and I think I solved a problem.
• Threading: general "how would you design a system?"

There were no Google/Microsoft-type questions.

When I was already working at Yahoo, my team members, when conducting interviews, asked candidates to solve real-life problems that we had in our product and then saw if their solutions matched ours.

Good things to know: design patterns, threading, how to choose your language, and then tricky things within your language. For example:

• PHP (magic methods)
• Javascript (closures, variadic functions)
• Java (inner classes)

Functions in JavaScript with a variable number of arguments.

What are closures?

How would you deal with multiple threads coming from the UI into your middle tier layer of a Model-View-Controller architecture?