Initial contacted by recruiter who setup the telephonic interview. The telephonic interview was very confusing. The interviewer had an accent and it was very difficult to understand the questions and reply back. I was really surprised to get an onsite interview call. The position was in Austin but my onsite interview was in Durham,NC. The team was split between Austin and North Carolina.
I was put in a nice hotel very close to the interview location. The stay and travel arrangements were excellent. Next day morning, the interview started at 9:00am. There were 6 rounds of technical 1:1 interview. The interview was led by director followed by his team members. The transition between the interviews were smooth with one interviewer leading you to another's cubicle. I thought they could have saved a lot of time if they had scheduled the interviews in the same room. The surprise was they had a skype interview setup with 2 Austin team members from Durham.
Coming to the questions:
1) There were many questions on my experience. What I was doing in my current role? Am I a team player or sole contributor?
2) white boarding alligned_malloc in C, bit manipulations; write a simple program to identify power of
2
3) Questions about test plan, test flow, test procedure and testing harness
4) OS and kernel concepts. The interviewer buried me with lot of device driver and process management questions. I thought I lost it here.. He asked me about scheduling, process management, file management, daemons, IPC communications, signal handling......
5) White boarding circular linked list program, multi threading implementation algorithm
End of it, I felt little exhausted and disappointed because I knew I did not crack an important round. You know some rounds are important in an interview.. I felt the OS and kernel concepts round was pretty important and I lost my way in that interview.
At hind sight, I felt it was good because I did not like the co-ordination between the Austin and NC team. The answers provided to questions about team interactions and sync up meetings was not convincing enough. Also, looks like there were missing decision makers in Austin site.
I did not hear back from the recruiter for a week, I called her back and checked to know my result. One thing to note here, it is always better to wait for a result, I have heard from many people that companies keep candidate's waiting if his/her performance is on an edge. If they don't get better candidates to fill the position, they will start considering the borderline cases. Henceforth, I will wait at least 3 weeks after my interview to ask for a response.