I got in touch with Zillow through a local recruiting company. I answered two pre-screen coding problems:

• Convert a string to a number.
• Implement 3-ary tree insert/delete operations.

They got back to me a few days after I submitted the problems. A phone interview was scheduled.

The interviewer sounded very disinterested from the start of the conversation. I lost my interest almost immediately. He was unfriendly and almost seemed as though he did not want to participate in the call.

He also asked a lot of school-like questions. These were theoretical questions about performance differences between various algorithms and between different programming languages, such as a C++ app versus a Java app. Some of the questions were good, but he focused too much on aspects that a software developer doesn't face too often in practice.

During the phone interview, they asked me to write code to find the first unique character in a string.