The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Pocket Gems (San Francisco, CA) in Nov 2011
Interview
I came onsite to talk with them. THey really liked my database backed work. The people here were all really smart and talented. I would have really liked to work here. They have free drinks at the office and a pool table and some other game machines. They seem pretty laid back. Everybody wears casual clothes.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Write code to partition a linked list around a value x so that all nodes less than x come before all nodes greater than x.
You have two numbers represented by a linked list where each node contains a single digit. The digits are stored in reverse order. Write a function to add two numbers and return another linked list.
I applied in-person. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Pocket Gems (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2012
Interview
I applied through the website.
I spoke on the phone several times with hiring managers. I had three phone screens with engineers. We used Google Docs to write a lot of code. It was very low-level stuff like arrays and strings.
When I came on site I spoke with 7 different people, mostly technical engineers. The interviews were very difficult, very detailed questions
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Implement a method to perform basic string compression using the counts of repeated characters. "aabcccc" becomes "2a1b4c".
You are given an array with integers between 1 and 1,000,000. One integer is in the array twice. How can you determine which one? Can you think of a way to do it using little extra memory.
There are n gas stations positioned along a circular road. Each has a limited supply of gas. You can only drive clockwise around the road. You start with zero gas. Knowing how much gas you need to get from each gas station to the next and how much gas you can get at each station, design an algorithm to find the gas station you need to start at to get all the way around the circle.
