Yesterday I arrived at 8:45 and left at 17:40. Nearly nine hours interviewing for a new job. I’m not sure how many people I talked to. In my mind they merged into a blur of coding tests on the white-board. “Write your own version of malloc() and free().” “Implement a function that converts a ASCII string into a floating point number.” “Reverse the order of the words in a string. Do it in place–without allocating more memory.” “Find the first unique character in a string.” “Write the test cases for your code.” “What is the big O of your solution? Can you do it better?” Those are just the ones I remember. My right arm went weak from writing on the white-board for so many hours. I remember the easiest question though. “What gets you up in the morning?” “My wife”, I answered.
Update: I’ve been getting calls and email asking how it went. It went well. Only the smallest of glitches. The 8.5 hours of interviews with eight different people today in a different group was generally easier except for one technical question that I severely crashed and burned on.
And the toughest question yesterday? “Show me a cure for spam email. You have 45 minutes.”
That sounds pretty tough. I have often thought, over the years, of leaving the Blue Ridge Mountains and going to Idaho. I have a brother who stays there part of the time and everything I hear about it is good. However, at 53 the idea of pulling up stakes and starting over is daunting. I’m not sure I could find work out there, either.
“Show me a cure for spam email..”
Two words; Death Penalty
SpamerShoot