Process took about a week. First part was a phone interview - we went over some parts of my resume that were relevant to the position, I was asked some technical questions: commonly used data structures, differences between array and linked list, how to build a linked list, questions about grep command. After that we had a shared work-space session online where I had to code two very simple programs in js - a second year comp sci student should have no problem coding them up. All together, this part took about 50 minutes.
I was invited to an on-site interview at FlipKey's office. The office space is well renovated factory building; modern and very well designed. Open-concept with a lot of space and light. I was impressed.
The interview was Google-style 4 one-hour individual white-board interviews with different team leads. Each interviewer had some questions about my past job experience and then presented a problem or two to solve on a white-board.
Some problems:
Write a program that character-reverses an ascii file.
Write an atoi function
Given an non-typical tree structure, split nodes into group by weight. Things to review: Sets, Lists, Tree Traversal, Greedy Algorithm, Knapsack problem.
A few other problems where knowledge of standard algorithms and data structures is required.
Overall the interview experience was good. From what I saw and learned about the company, I would have liked working there.
I had one major complaint:
I didn't realize ahead of time how long the interview process was. The interview stretched well over the lunch hour and by the end I was exhausted and passing out from hunger. I felt it was inconsiderate of FlipKey to not offer me lunch or at least a break between interviews, considering I mentioned a few times that I was hungry. Especially considering that the whole company was having catered lunch that day - when I asked for coffee they actually walked me by the lunch trays. In retrospect I should have gotten over my shyness and asked them to give me lunch. Being burned out and having low blood sugar definitely took a big hit on my performance.
