Fresh Interview Stories

Share your interview story and questions

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 08:37:00 -0600

There is nothing like the feeling of elation after you know you ace'd your interview.

Or, maybe you gave it your best shot but fell short.

Either way or in between, this is the perfect place, to share your experience. Take a few minutes to answer any or all of the questions below in the comments section.

All comments will be reviewed for appropriateness before being posted and your name/user id will not appear anywhere in website. This is your chance to give real and honest feedback in a completely anonymous way!

1. What company were you interviewed by and which location?

2. What position were you being considered for?

3. What kind of interview was it? i.e., phone, first round in person, final, etc.?

4. How were you treated by the company before, during, and after the interview?

5. What was your general impression of the company?

6. Please share some of the interview questions.

7. Do you think you'll get an offer and if so, do you think you'll accept?

Mind boggling

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 09:16:00 -0600

The Googleinterview process is Infamous for it’s mind boggling and creative methods to test new candidates. Here are two I’ve selected for you to first try to solve yourself, then see Google’s perfect answer.

Q. How many golf balls will fit in a Mini?

We will use a new mini opposed to a classic mini shape.

It is shorter than a person, so maybe its 4.5 feet high, but with the clearance off the floor, lets say roughly 4 foot. There’s space for two people to sit side by side, with roughly 2.5 feet per person. So that’s 5 feet wide. It’s probably two people long, which is approximately ten feet. However the bonnet takes up half the length, so the usable length is 5 feet. The interior volume, then, is about 4 X 5 X 5, which is 100 cubic feet.

A golf ball is somewhat bigger than an inch in diameter. Let’s say that 10 golf balls line up to make a foot. A cubic lattice of 10 X 10 X 10 golf balls, an even thousand, would just about occupy a cubic foot. That gives a quick answer of about 100 X 1,000 = 100,000

Or ….. take into consideration that each ball could be packed more densely given the shape of each. Effectively resting in an imaginary Lucite cude whose edges equal the ball’s diameter. You stack those Lucite cubes like building blocks. This would mean that the balls occupy about 52 per cent of the space. Break out of the imaginary Lucite boxes, and you can pack far more balls in a volume. This is an empirical fact. Physicists have done experiments by pouring steel balls into big flasks and calculating the density. The resulting random packing occupies anywhere from 55 to 64 per cent of the space. That’s denser than a cubic lattice. It’s also a fairly large range. How you fill the container matters. When the spheres are added gradually and gently, like sand pouring through an hourglass, the density is at the low-end of the range. When the container is shaken vigorously, the spheres settle into a denser packing of up to 64 per cent.

Where does this leave us? Someone willing to painstakingly stack golf balls in the cannonball pattern can pack about 42 per cent more gold balls in the mini than you’d estimate from a cubic lattice (or as above). That seems an absurd amount of labor, even for an absurd question. The reported density of stirred random packing is a more realistic goal. You might achieve that by pouring golf balls into the mini and stirring with a stick to settle them. That would give a density of about 20 per cent more than that of a cubic lattice. You might therefore increase your final estimate by 20 per cent, from 100,000 to 120,000.

For the record, the Mini website states a Mini Cooper Hardtop is 145.6 inches long, 75.3 inches wide (including mirror) and 55.4 inches high. The regulation diameter of a golf ball is 1.690 inches, give or take 0.005 inches.

Q. It’s raining and you have to get to your car at the far end of the car park. Are you better off running or not, if the goal is to minimize how wet you get?

What if you have an umbrella?

To answer this question, you must reconcile two conflicting trains of thought. The case for running is this; the longer you are in the rain, the more drops fall on your head, and the wetter you get. Running shortens your exposure to the elements and thereby keep you drier.

There’s also a case for not running; In moving horizontally, you slam into raindrops that wouldn’t have touched you had you been standing still. A person who runs in the rain for a minute gets wetter than a person who just stands in the rain for a minute.

That valid point is mostly besides the point. You have to get to your car and there’s nothing to be done about that. Imagine yourself zipping across the car park at infinite speed. Your senses are infinitely accelerated, too, so you don’t slam into cars. From your point of view, external time has stopped. It’s like the bullet time effect in a movie. All the raindrops hand motionless in the air. Not one drop will fail on your head or back or sides during the trip. The front of your clothing will sop up every single raindrop hanging in the path from shelter to car.

When you travel at normal speed, you’re fated to run into those raindrops or, rather their successors. At normal speed, you also have drops falling on your head. The number of raindrops you encounter will depend on the length of your horizontal path and also on the time it takes to travel that path. The length of the path is a given. The only thing you can control is the time it takes. To stay as dry as possible, you should run as fast as possible. Running makes you less wet –provided you don’t have an umbrella.

Had you an umbrella as wide as a city block, and where you able to hold it, it wouldn’t matter whether you sauntered or sprinted. You’d be dry as toast.

Most umbrellas are barely big enough to keep the user dry when he or she is standing in general, vertical rain. In practice, you expect to get a little wet.

Umbrellas work by creating a rain shadow, a zone where there are no raindrops. In a vertical downpour, and with a circular umbrella, the rain shadow is a cylinder. When the rain is coming at an angle, the rain shadow becomes a skewed cylinder. However, as every seasoned umbrella user knows, its best to point the umbrella in the direction of the driving rain. This makes the rain shadow a proper cylinder again. Now pointed at an angle to the vertical,

The standing human body doesn’t fit so well into a slanted cylinder. Were a hurricane driving the rain at you horizontally, you would have to hold the umbrella horizontally, and a tree foot diameter would protect only about half your body. The rest would get soaked.

Wind is bad, and so is motion. The skilled umbrella wielder knows to tilt the umbrella forward, in the direction of the motion, to get the maximum coverage. In fact, wind and motion are indistinguishable as far as optimal umbrella pointing goes. Running at ten miles an hour in windless, vertical rain demands the same tilt as standing still in ten-mile an hour wind. Either way, the raindrops are coming at you ten miles an hour, horizontally, in addition to their downward velocity.

In vertical rain, you’re best off walking slowly. The umbrella will not have to be tilted much, and your body should fit within the rain shadow. Ideally, you should walk no faster than the speed where the rain shadow just covers your feet. Then you’d stay dry.

Reality is messier than that, there are always going to be gusts of wind, spatter from pavement, and runoff from the umbrella itself. The rain hitting the top of the umbrella does not disappear: it slides off the umbrella and falls in a cylindrical sheet encircling the rain shadow. There is more rain in that run off zone than anywhere else. That means that any part of your body that intersects the runoff zone gets wetter faster than it would have you not used an umbrella at all.

The advantage of slowness diminishes in high headwinds.

The umbrella has to be pitched at such angle that your lower body is out of the rain showdown. You’ll get half soaked no matter what you do.

All that reasoning boils down to the advice you may have heard from mum: walk if you’ve got an umbrella: run if you don’t.

Google vs Microsoft interview experience

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 09:55:00 -0600

When you are preparing for an interview, you think about what you'll wear, the people you'll meet, and what they'll expect of you when you arrive. As an ambitious student trying to get that "dream job" out of college, I was faced with these questions.

IT is competitive for the job seeker, and for someone who is fresh out of school with little experience, the job search process was daunting. My previous interview experience was non-existent, and prior to this, I had worked at my father's small business accounting firm which, fortunately for me, never required an interview.

So here I was, a week before my senior year of college, getting ready for my first real interview ever. What made this experience even scarier was that I was interviewing with one of the most sought-after tech companies in the business -- Google. I had found the job online while perusing Google's careers page. I never expected a response. I mean come on now, Google? They must get hundreds of thousands of applications a year. I was a needle in the haystack.

After a few follow-up emails and a technical phone screen, I was given the opportunity to fly out to its Mountain View campus for an interview. I really had no idea what to expect, or how to prepare. I was so overwhelmed at the time that it was pretty much a blur. My day consisted of three interviews with Google's famous free, on-campus lunch in between the last two. While I won't go into any of the specifics of what I was asked, I can say that from the moment I walked into the room I was grilled about everything -- from nitty-gritty technical whiteboard drawings to logical problem solving. I did my best to keep up, but half the time, I didn't even know whether my answers were correct. I constantly dug through my head, hoping that my education up to that point was sufficient.

I walked away feeling somewhat skeptical about my performance. Did they like my problem solving and rationalization skills? More importantly, had my education prepared me enough for this? Granted, at the time I still had another year left of school, but it was still something to consider. A few weeks later, I got the call informing me that I didn't get the job. Was I disappointed? Yes, but it was certainly an unforgettable learning experience.

Over the course of the next few months, I had the opportunity to interview with other companies. I was provided with a list of jobs that matched my degree via my school's online career site, making it easy for me to apply. This, along with my own research, helped me gather as much information as I could about the types of jobs that were available for new graduates -- from small, high-tech financial trading firms to Fortune 500 IT shops -- and I tailored my skill set to become more comfortable in the interview room.

When it came time to interview with Microsoft, I was more prepared and knew what to expect. Unlike Google, however, I had an initial interview on campus prior to being selected to fly out to Redmond. In similar fashion, I was given questions of varying degrees of difficulty. The position I was applying for required an analytical thinking style with a stronger emphasis on the business aspect of IT. For example, I was asked to explain what cloud computing is to someone with limited knowledge in technology. Communication skills are critical to the consulting trade. Rather than being doused with technical questioning, the interviewers looked to see how well I could communicate complex topics. Overall, I felt much more relaxed and in my element.

One of the unique aspects of my time in Redmond was the interview environment. In between interviews, I was in a room filled with music, video games, and movies. While it may sound unheard of, it actually worked in my favor helping to keep my mind off things for a bit. Not to mention that it was an awesome way to spend a day of interviewing! That same day, I was offered the position as an Associate Consultant. The first and probably most challenging leg of my journey had been complete -- nailing the interview.

I want to reflect on all of this for a moment. Expectations play a mind-consuming role in the process. During each interview, I couldn't help but think about what the person in front of me expected of my performance. Despite the intensive coursework that comes with a degree, I found that it's just as important to anticipate a whole new learning experience. Interviewing taught me just that. Regardless of whether or not my answers were right, I learned that what matters most to Microsoft will be the experiences I encounter on the job itself.

You won't know everything when you graduate, nor are you expected to. Besides, if you think you do, you're going to have a tough time getting a job. In fact, this is what the "real world" is all about.

The best part about technology is how quickly it changes. No matter what role you hold in IT, you will find cool things you didn't know before. This is why I can't wait to start my job -- every day will be a new adventure!

A short interview with Google employees

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 16:02:00 -0600

A short interview with Google employees about working there.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=knAyZ4jsCYE

Google Interview Setup

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 09:42:00 -0600

When shooting in NYC you have to make the most of small spaces. Luckily Google’s offices are extremely creative and the background is always fun. Here I had to spread out on a small table to achieve the optimal distance from the subject.

Google Interview Question 2012

Tue, 29 May 2012 07:29:00 -0600

Interview questions asked by Google Recruitment team after qualifying the first on-campus round comprising a written exam:

Round 1:
1) Given a database, a query returns correct output 99% of the time, however 1% of the time, it returns wrong output. What could be the possible reasons?
2) On a 2-D grid, the positions (x,y) of 3 persons are given. Find the meeting point such that sum of distances of each person from meeting point is minimized.
Now generalize this to N persons and solve.
3) A very long question related to hashing. I don't remember it.

Round 2:
1) Given a string of parantheses, check if the string is valid. ex: [[]] is valid, ][][ is not valid. How would you solve if the parantheses could be of different types like {,[,(
2) Given a layout like
a b c d e
f g h i j
k l m n o
p q r s t
u v w x y
z
Your initial point is a. You want to form a string like "movie". WAP to find the sequence of moves consisting of letters 'U','D','L','R'
( normal conventions) that would form the movie. for example: for string "afg" sequence would be DR.

Round 3:
1) Given a number N, form all possible paranthesizations. like for N=3, there would be 5 possible parathesizations (catalan numbers ).
Kept on asking to optimize time and space.
2) Given a 8X8 chess-board, there is a bishop placed on a square (i,j). You have to move to any square (x,y). In how many moves you could do it ?
Find the intemediate point.
3) Given an array of integers, where each element of array represents height of a building. Width of each building is 1. [ Think of it as histogram].
It starts raining, so water will get accumulated between some buildings. Find the amount of water that will be accumulated.

Round 4:
1) Given a rod of length L, there are some positions marked on rod at which the rod can be cut. The cost of cutting at any position is the current length of rod you are cutting. Like if the rod length is 10 and you can cut it at 4,9, cost of cutting at any position would be 10.
Find the minimum cost of cutting the rod.

2) What features would you suggest that should be added in Google+ to attract more users.
What signals would you use to determine any particular interest of a user.
More on similar topics, like suppose you have to design a page where top 100 posts by random users on Google+. What signals would you use to determine that. How would you rank the posts on that page.

Round 5:
1) Questions on final year project.
2) Design an interface on cache. Then I was asked incremental questions of the code that I have written. Pointed some issues and I was asked to correct them.

Two numbers question

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:37:00 -0600

A friend of mine is interviewing for a job. One of the interview questions got me thinking, just wanted some feedback.

There are 2 non-negative integers: i and j. Given the following equation, find an (optimal) solution to iterate over i and j in such a way that the output is sorted.

2^i * 5^j

So the first few rounds would look like this:

2^0 * 5^0 = 1
2^1 * 5^0 = 2
2^2 * 5^0 = 4
2^0 * 5^1 = 5
2^3 * 5^0 = 8
2^1 * 5^1 = 10
2^4 * 5^0 = 16
2^2 * 5^1 = 20
2^0 * 5^2 = 25

Try as I might, I can't see a pattern. Your thoughts?

Intearview.com

Wed, 09 May 2012 17:01:00 -0600

We've moved to http://intearview.com/! So please update your rss subscriptions (those who subscribed through feedburner - the url remains the same http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleInterview).

Thanks and see you again,

Intearview Team

Few notes about behavior questions

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:48:00 -0600

Background: I'm a hiring manager for sysadmins, tech support people, and the occasional front-line manager thereof, and have worked in and interviewed for those positions most of my career, except for a brief stint driving trains -- of which the interview phase was surprisingly valuable in giving me an alternate view of how interviewing can be done.

Whilst I have restructured my company's hiring practices (for the roles I'm involved in) to include MT-inspired behavioural questions, I firmly believe that they are not enough, on their own, to be able to sufficiently determine a candidate's suitability for the role. Historically, my company's interview process was centered around a written technical quiz, and I haven't removed it from the interview process (and I have no intention of ever doing so).

The problem is that the candidate gets to pick the stories they tell, and while you can (and must!) interject to get more information about the candidate's thought processes, if I'm getting a bunch of stories about tracking down performance problems, and I need my candidate to be able to fix performance problems *and* write some scripts, I can't tell if I'm getting a certain set of stories because they're the most appropriate ones or because they're the *only* ones.

My guess as to why you perhaps don't do a big "technical" interview (where I define that as "assessing the candidate's ability to recall and apply the industry-specific body-of-knowledge", rather than firm-specific "fit", or other "soft" skills) in the legal profession is that you've got to pass an (as I understand it) strong technical assessment (a bar exam or equivalent) before you can even hope to get a job *anywhere* in the industry. As such, you can be fairly sure that any candidate who comes to you having passed the bar exam will know the basics of the law.

No such qualifying exam exists in IT, and so we've essentially got to do the equivalent of a bar exam to every candidate who comes through the door, just to make sure they've got the slightest hope of being able to do the job. (Before you ask: no, a degree is *not* sufficient -- I taught some classes at a University, I know what goes on, and there are no shortage of graduates of "reputable" CS programs who I wouldn't trust to plug in my toaster, let alone administer systems). I suspect that the lack of a baseline industry-wide certification, and a very different focus on what makes a "good" employee, pretty much explains the difference in interview structure between the two professions.

As an aside, I've actually been through (and passed) the Google interview process - in many ways, it has elements of behavioural and roleplay interviewing as part of the lengthy technical interview you go through. The pre-qualifying phone screens were in effect "tech quizzes", or "bar exams", and the in-person interviews were, for all intents and purposes, role-plays of various aspects of the day-to-day work in the job I was interviewing for. There wasn't a formal "behavioural questioning" part, and no interviews with "the hiring manager" (I think you get assigned to a team after you join the company -- in my case, the team I was interviewing for hadn't been formed yet, and they didn't have a manager at all yet), and that might be hurting them a little bit, but it's not a million miles away from the spirit of what MT recommends, in my opinion.

Task: Find meeting point

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:11:00 -0600

There is a matrix, m x n. Several groups of people locate at some certain spots. In the following example, there are three groups and the number 4 indicates there are four people in this group. Now we want to find a meeting point in the matrix so that the cost of all groups moving to that point is the minimum. As for how to compute the cost of moving one group to another point, please see the following example.

Group1: (0, 1), 4

Group2: (1, 3), 3

Group3: (2, 0), 5

. 4 . .

. . . 3

5 . . .

If all of these three groups moving to (1, 1), the cost is: 4*((1-0)+(1-1)) + 5*((2-1)+(1-0))+3*((1-1)+(3-1))

Screening interview, math questions

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:44:00 -0600

For starters, don't just automatically act all "Game Over, man!" when you hit a dead end! Also, it helps to try to keep talking as you come up with an answer, because silence is very uncomfortable for both you and the interviewer!

There are companies that deal with numbers that will ask you some math questions. These are the kind of questions that you could use a computer or paper and pencil for.

According to a survey, 70 percent of the public likes coffee, and 80 percent likes tea. What are the upper and lower bounds of people who like both coffee and tea?
At 3:15, what is the angle between the minute and hour hands on an analog clock?
How many integers between 1 and 1, 000 contain a 3?
A book has N pages, numbered the usual way, from 1 to N. The total number of digits in the page numbers is 1, 095. How many pages does the book have?
How many 0s are at the end of 100 factorial? (That's 100 multiplied by every whole number smaller than itself, down to 1.)

If you like math, you'll love the above questions. If you don't...well, let's just say you're in for a world of hurt!

Jim's experience

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:04:00 -0600

There were 3 rounds of interview.
In the first round they asked s string related question.
1. Given a string and set of characters, find the shortest substring which contains all the characters in the string.
In the 2nd round
2.Given a 2d sorted matrix (known as tableau) . where rows and cols are sorted, write an algo to find an element.
In the 3rd round they asked about garbage collection in java, about my projects and a question related to graphs I dont remeber exactly at this point.

Geometric question

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:35:00 -0600

Given 2n points on a circle.find the number of ways to draw n non intersecting chords.

Easy questions & solutions

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:10:00 -0600

You have 1 to N-1 array and 1 to N numbers, and one number is missing, you need to find the missing the number. Now you have 1 to N-2 numbers, and two numbers missing. Find them.

Solution:
The question can be elucidated as follows.Given an array of size N-1 containing numbers less than N and with out any duplicates!! We knew that there is a number missing from the array say K .Let S be the sum of the elements of the array.

Sum of first N natural numbers=N*(N+1)/2

and S=N*(N+1)/2 – K.Now putting this other way around we get K=N*(N+1)/2 -S !!

Now the second part of the question says that there are 2 of the first N numbers missing.Let they be X and Y.

We solve this problem by solving 2 essential equations.

They are X+Y=N*(N+1)/2 -S (1)

X*Y=N!/P (2) where S and P are the cumulative sum and product of the array entries.

You have cycle in linked list. Find it. Prove that time complexity is linear. Also find the node at which looping takes place.

Solution:
The problem of checking whether there is a cycle or not can be solved using 2 pointers one moving in increments of 1 and the other in increments of 2.If there is a cycle then these 2 pointers meet at some node say N1 inside the cycle otherwise the fast pointer reaches the end of the list.This is a O(N) solution.

Now coming to the identification of the node at which looping took place.After our identification of cycle ,both the pointers P1 and P2 are at node N1.Now iterate the slow pointer to count the no of nodes in the cycle.(After traversing the whole cycle P1 and P2 shall again be at the same node).Let this size be K.Now take one of the pointers to the head node and count the no of nodes till N1.Let this number be X.Now use one of these pointers to reverse the cycle starting from N1.Only the cycle gets reversed.Now again traverse from head node to N1.Let the number of nodes this time be Y.Let the no of nodes from head to the start node of the cycle be Z

Now X+Y=2*Z+K .Hence solve for K and then having figured out the start node N2 of the cycle.Now as the cycle is reversed having figured out this start node its next node is the looping nodes so set the looping nodes next pointer to NULL and reverse the list further till you reach N2.
Questions on my project please be prepare well about your project
How do you search for a word in a large database.
How do you build address bar in say gmail. i.e. if you press ‘r’ then you get all email starting from ‘r’, and if you press ‘ra’ then you will get emails starting from ‘ra’.

Why This Programmer Didn't Get His Dream Job At Google

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:25:00 -0600

Interviewing at Google bucked Wes Bos' pre-conceived notions of what an ideal candidate is.

The web developer thought Google wanted someone with a degree in computer science and only hires guys who can program in many languages.

But to his surprise, Google showed interest in him. On his blog, Bos wrote about what it was like to go through the job interview process at Google. Bos described the entire process, from emailing the HR person to being quizzed by engineers.

Here's what he had to do -- and what went wrong.

Before the interview, the recruiter told him to brush up on the basics. "The HR rep sent over an email with some guidelines and things to brush up on which included comp sci 101 things such as sorting algos, hash tables, binary trees and so on. I was familiar with a few things on the list, but I definitely had to do a lot of reading in the week and a half before my interview."

Demonstrate how you'd solve real world problems. Here, a mobile developer asked him which algorithms would work in specific situations. "I tripped over quite a few of these and felt pretty embarrassed."

Be ready to code on a whiteboard. This is tricky if you're used to programming entirely on a computer. "I had never coded on a whiteboard before and I felt like I made a few stupid mistakes. Next up was another mobile developer from another product that they work on in the Google Waterloo office. We started off talking JavaScript performance again and then jumped right into the coding problem on the whiteboard. I was pretty nervous at this point in time and I made a few more silly mistakes that I wouldn’t have done in a proper IDE." (An IDE, or integrated development environment, is a type of software used by developers to write code.)

He didn't get the job, but was happy he went through tne process anyway. Most important, it taught him that learning multiple languages would make him a better developer, and that Google will take a look at young coders.

"Always be hustlin.’ A few years ago I would have never of thought I would be interviewing at Google just 9 months fresh out of school. Anything can happen," he wrote.