I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Tripadvisor in May 2012
Interview
The initial phone interview went very well. so I got invited to an onsite interview.
The interviewers came into the room one at a time.
As they were talking to me, they held a pen and a notebook very tight and constantly wrote stuff in their notebooks. It was very intimidating and I felt like a patient under observation.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
The first interviewer described to me a system that he called h-score. h-score is a score that publishers get if articles that they publish get citations in other articles.
A publisher gets h-score of x if they wrote at least x articles that got x citations each.
Given an array with the number of citations per article, write a function to calculate the h-score for the publisher.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Tripadvisor (Newton, MA) in Jul 2010
Interview
This company has put me through the worst hiring process I ever experienced. The process dragged on for weeks. They did a phone screen and two rounds of face to face. Throughout the whole process I was forced to solve brainteasers and white-board problems for EVERY person I spoke with. Furthermore, some puzzles had no solution (according to the interviewer), others had nothing to do with software development.
Throughout the entire process I was constantly reminded what a great company they were, how many brilliant people worked there, and what a huge favor they were doing me by letting my talentless self interview there.
After going through 7 or 8 interviewers over the course of two sessions, I got an offer, which was far lower than what I asked for. When I politely declined, their head of technical recruiting (not going to name him but there is only one) proceeded to insult me and try to strong-arm me into taking their offer - incredibly unprofessional. Needless to say I still declined. That was 2010.
I have recently talked to them again - a face-to-face with a hiring manager. While he was fully aware of the offer they have given me in the past, he still proceeded to give me a whiteboard problem and after I solved it, proceeded to tell me that I would have to go through the whole interview process from scratch again and that my added experience didn't matter and they will still only consider me for the same position as they had 2 years earlier. After that, I had a brief chat with the same technical recruiter, who insulted me the last time and who apparently still works there. He proceeded to project the same smug attitude and I left with a bad taste in my mouth. Needless to say, I will not have anything to do with this company ever again. Your mileage may vary, but I did not get an impression that they have a good idea about how to attract quality engineers and I would not want to work there.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a program that given 4 coin denominations and a dollar amount finds the best way to express that amount using the coins given.
I.e. you have coins with denominations of 1c, 7c, 13c,19c and you have to express $2.12 with the least number of coins.
There is always a 1c coin but the other 3 are arbitrary.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Tripadvisor (Watertown, MA) in Mar 2012
Interview
1st round is phone interview. 2nd round is group interview
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a BST with leaf nodes having a numeric value, and nodes having the sum of values of its two children. Find an algorithm to find the maximum node within a tree.