Junior Platform Team Software Engineer

I received an on-site interview invitation directly through an employee referral. After two months, I was invited for the on-site. I interviewed with four people.

First: In a binary tree, prune leaves that are odd and have no even children, recursively.

Second: Deep Java and Object-Oriented Programming questions, including inheritance, polymorphism, overloading, and many questions about the Collections Framework. This involved understanding their internal implementations and when to use each one, as well as downcasting and upcasting, and complex exception handling questions.

Third (with the Team Lead): Very random and irrelevant questions, such as TCP handshaking, DNS servers, how the internet works end-to-end, variable alignment in memory, how the CPU connects to memory, how Tomcat works, and its thread pools. The interviewer was inconsistent and started and ended with a very negative impression. There were no questions about Java or distributed systems.

Fourth (with the Manager): He described Yahoo's scaling challenges and asked how I would solve them. This included questions about scaling Redis, Kafka, Mesos, and Memcached. I believe these questions were appropriate for a senior position.

My suggestion is that if you are not from India, do not waste your time interviewing with Yahoo's platform team.

In a binary tree, prune leaves that are odd and have no even children, recursively.