Terrible experience. It started with, "Tell me about your project." I told him about one. He said, "You know you applied for search and data mining." (As I said, my current company project wasn't in a big data company yet). Apparently, he didn't look at my whole resume, which lists academic experience in MapReduce, Machine Learning, and IR.

Anyway, after 10 minutes, he asked, "Tell me how you would improve Yelp after joining. What project would you tackle to add a new feature, blah blah?" So I described my idea. Thank goodness I thought of that earlier; otherwise, who's going to come up with "improving" rather than expecting normal interview questions?

Anyway, he carelessly listened. We had a discussion, then two more questions on that:

1. How would you test it?
2. How would you measure it? As in, should we keep your application on, or just take it back because no one is using it?

By this time, we had 15 minutes left for the "real" technical round. Then he asked the SAME question which someone posted here: "Find the longest palindromic substring."

Again, I knew the question. I described the solution. 10 minutes left. Unfortunately, I mistyped some stuff as I didn't "mug up" the solution. Hence, it didn't pass all the test cases in 5 minutes. WTF.

Find the longest palindromic substring.