Round 1: Written Test
Included 15 questions that contained pseudocode most closely resembling Java. Thus the test was based on concepts rather than syntax. Also contained a very basic couple of questions based on CSS which is something the company would require from a selected employee. This was an elimination round which was rather surprising due to the small set of questions involved.
Round 2:Technical Interview 1
-> Introduction
This was just a gentle introduction where all the 3 interviewers met the interviewees, introduced themselves and asked questions such as our names, our hobbies, experience with technical stuff, about our department itself and whether we'd used the product before the company came to the department.
-> Asked me about my job as a Sun Campus Ambassador and other stuff from my resume.
-> Which of the technologies you have listed in your resume are you most confident in.
-> What are the various Storage Engines available in MySQL. (I had MySQL as a skill on my resume and had given sessions on the same) What are the advantages of InnoDB? Are there any licensing issues with it? Which would you prefer to use?
-> Factorial of a number using recursion. It's time complexity.
-> Fibonacci Series and it's time complexity.
-> What is backtracking? How is dynamic programming different from backtracking, or is it the same?
-> Print a linked list in reverse.
-> Given a set of 9 balls out of which one has incorrect weight (less or more). Find it using a balance in the minimum number of steps.
-> About PHP (One of my listed technologies), do you know about cookies, sessions and stuff. Which of my listed projects were in PHP? Did I handle the case for illegal access?
-> Implement grep. Now implement grep by storing metadata on a very large file.
Round 3: Technical Interview 2
-> Tell me about yourself.
-> Asked about my job with Sun.
-> Do you still blog?
-> About storage engines in MySQL. We use MyISAM. Why do you think we do that?
-> Tell me about a project where you've worked on a tight deadline.
-> Did you use a version control system on this project?
-> Reverse a linked list
-> Find a loop in a linked list.
-> Print a square matrix in spiral order. E.g.
-------------
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
-------------
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
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| 7 | 8 | 9 |
-------------
Should print 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 8, 7, 4, 5.
-> A chicken has to cross a street of 3 lanes over to the other side. It can move (forward, left, right or backwards) and has cars approaching from its left. It can only look one position around it. Design how you'd represent this problem and aim to solve it. (The interviewer revealed all the detail I've stated above in steps or when I asked)
Round 4: HR Interview
The HR interviewer was an engineer as well which is to be expected in startups especially web-based ones. Actually I've been asked about Cloud computing and other such stuff in other interviews as well.
-> About family background.
-> About cloud computing.
-> What is Web 2.0?
-> A startup is different from an MNC in many respects. You might have to work for long hours, or at irregular times. Are you comfortable with that? How are you suited to work for a startup?
-> What are your short-term professional goals (3 years)?
-> If you were made the CEO of the company, what are the additions you would make to the product itself.
-> How would you implement search on Slideshare? Give me a methodology. Do you know about any open-source search engine? What was the algorithm that Google famously brought to search?
-> Do you have any live website that I could view right now?
-> Do you read some technical blogs?
Round 5: Online Interview
This was a web chat over Skype a few days later. Before the interview I was told that I would be coding the solution to a given problem in an hour. I'd have to design a database on the spot, write down the SQL and make it interact with a program. This could have been done in absolutely any language.(I think) I chose to do this in PHP and the development environment was WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and I used Netbeans as my IDE. Time was around 1 hour and we were talking over Skype while I was coding. The problem was to implement a basic (scalability no bar) database that would allow simple twitter-like functionality, i.e. users, add followers and tweets. The webpage had to show all the tweets (or a subset thereof) for a given user in reverse chronological order. Just the output had to be shown with little to no CSS or Javascript.
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