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Software Engineer Interview Experience - Sunnyvale, California

October 1, 2012
Positive ExperienceGot Offer

Process

I was called directly onsite after I met them during the career fair and had four interviews there.

First interview was completely algorithms-based. They asked around 4-5 coding problems, including problems that required one-armed quicksort, binary tree-related questions, some bit manipulation, and they also started with 1 or 2 easy recursion-based problems, maybe to ease your nerves.

Second interview was again algorithms-based and the questions were simple, but in the last 20 minutes, the interviewer started a discussion on Java internals, and that got pretty complex.

Third interview was the most fun. The interviewer asked me three questions, all pretty hard, especially the last one, which was to make any given string a palindrome by adding the minimum number of characters. Well, you have to use DP, and if you have seen it before, then it's easy, but it was the first time I was solving this. So, it was fun and challenging.

Last interview involved some initial coding which required hash map-based solutions, followed by a design question.

Questions

Make any given string a palindrome by adding the minimum number of characters.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 79 interview experiences for the Yahoo Software Engineer role in Sunnyvale, California.

Success Rate

41%
Pass Rate

Yahoo's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in Sunnyvale, California is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive54%
Neutral20%
Negative25%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Yahoo's Software Engineer interview process in Sunnyvale, California.

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