I had two phone interviews scheduled on consecutive days. Three weeks later, I was invited for the onsite interview.

The onsite interviews consisted of three 45-minute interviews back to back, with no breaks in between. The recruiters showed us around the campus (I came for what is known as "yodel day," where they interview many candidates), and we had a small presentation from the recruiters about Yahoo.

The only issue was that they were really slow in getting back to me. I did not know what time I was going to be picked up at the hotel until the morning of my interview, when I received a call from my recruiter at 7 a.m. I had been planning on just getting to the lobby at 8 a.m. and waiting around until I saw the shuttle.

I did not receive the itinerary for the day until the morning of my interview as well, even though I was told that I would receive it early in the week. In my opinion, this was highly unprofessional.

They asked me a variety of questions, including project work with a focus on databases.

Their questions covered:

• An SQL query
• Unix commands
• Object-oriented design patterns (specifically the factory method)
• Java language concepts (such as annotations)
• Algorithms

Some of the algorithm questions included simple ones, like checking if a word is a palindrome and serializing a tree. They also asked me to implement the HashMap data structure.