{"id":752,"date":"2004-01-30T11:11:00","date_gmt":"2004-01-30T17:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=752"},"modified":"2004-01-30T11:11:00","modified_gmt":"2004-01-30T17:11:00","slug":"technical-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=752","title":{"rendered":"Technical interview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I got all nervous &#038; flustered, but then I warmed up&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p><lj-cut text=details>First he wanted me to talk about a technical problem, and I finally felt like I had something worth talking about.  Yay, Ro.  But this problem is mostly math and very little architecture, so he wasn&#8217;t terribly interested in that angle.<\/p>\n<p>He was like write me a function to reverse strings, preferrably in place.  At first I pulled out pen &#038; paper, but it wasn&#8217;t coming to me.  Then I opened up emacs, &#038; the juice started to flow again.  I&#8217;m not sure if my function puts the terminating null at the beginning, and I did confuse a variable name, and I forgot to return.  Did I mention I was flustered?  Fortunately, the confusion was probably unnoticed, and the method was basically sound.  Phones, bleh!<\/p>\n<p>Then another one where I was reducing the order of a function from the obvious O(n^2) implementation (well, he didn&#8217;t give the O(n^2) implementation, but it was, as I say, obvious.  I got it down to O(n*log(n)) with little prompting (sort first, then do something qsort-esque for a linear time implementation), and then, with a moderate amount of prompting, down to O(n) (lookup tables, it&#8217;s all about the lookup tables).  <\/p>\n<p>Some object oriented design questions.  I had the technicalities right, and I gave strong stylistic reasons, and after prompting, gave the technical reasons for a virtual function in a toy example.  <\/p>\n<p>For the last technical question, we played with in order and pre order binary tree traversals.  My intuition was completely correct, my solution was suboptimal, but good.  <\/p>\n<p>He asked about my goal of being a contractor on my resume, and I assured him I was looking for something full-time-ish with them.  I asked for the next step, &#8220;I&#8217;ll give them my evaluation and our people will call you, and possibly schedule an in person interview&#8221;, and then asked for the insider&#8217;s perspective on what they did.  His answer added some to the description, but more by way of flavor than detail.<\/p>\n<p>I think I did well.  All the right answers, if not exactly smooth.  We shall see what comes of it.  Laundry, and work, and stuff.  I may not say much before monday.  Wish me luck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got all nervous &#038; flustered, but then I warmed up&#8230;. First he wanted me to talk about a technical problem, and I finally felt like I had something worth talking about. Yay, Ro. But this problem is mostly math and very little architecture, so he wasn&#8217;t terribly interested in that angle. He was like &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=752\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Technical interview&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}