Zhanga: April 25, 2007

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Wednesday, April 25, 2007 (5 comments)

That stupid Indian pizza crap gave me diarrhea 30 minutes before my interviews began yesterday. Indian pizza... never eat that stuff.

I'll get to the interviews soon. First, the food.

Eating the crappy sushi at Duke has made me forget how good sushi really is. I went to a Korean barbeque last night and got eight pieces of sushi. They tasted absolutely amazing, and if my tongue could have multiple orgasms...

Unfortunately, my stomach didn't feel so good, because along with the sushi I ate six mussels, assorted appetizers, ane a huge bowl of beef noodles. With a glass of iced tea and tip, it all cost $33. Good thing Microsoft is reimbursing me... the joy of free food! Come to think of it, the (lack of) cost probably made the meal taste 50% better.

Before yesterday, the only time I've ever spent more than $30 on a meal for myself was when we went downtown for CiCi's 16th, but that restaurant wasn't my choice. Yes, I am so cheap that I'm still complaining about a $32 (plus tip?) meal three and a half years later.

When the waitress asked me what I would like to drink, I opened my mouth to say "water" before I caught myself and asked for iced tea. I figure if I put up with diarrhea food the night before and cafeteria food for lunch, I should feel free to indulge/gorge myself for dinner.

That was, perhaps, the most satisfying meal I've ever eaten. Not even watermelon would have made it better (I would have exploded and scattered my entrails all over Seattle).

It was kind of like going on a dinner date, except she sits there and watches you eat both meals while not talking about shoes. And on top of it all, you don't have to pay. What a dream! (*ducks*)

Ok, now for the four interviews. I am warning you now that some stuff below may be pretty technical, so here is the summary: went mostly well, went well, went kind of well, got raped. Now the details:

The first few went pretty well. The girl who gave me my first technical interview asked me to tell her the differences between a struct and a class, and when I would use one over the other. Yeah... I had about as much clue as you (this sentence should be approximately true, assuming only sags read this). I kind of just sat there and went "uhhh, ummmmm, uhhhh, ok I have no idea."

Besides that one point, the interview went pretty well. Then the next guy was a stereotypical overweight nerd. He wore a "got geek?" shirt which I liked. He gave me the standard boolean isPalindrome(String foo) problem to do (determine whether a string reads the same forwards and backwards), and it was especially easy because he let me do it in Java. (The other interviewers wanted C++, and I don't know C++ as well. (Those are two programming languages.)) We finished half an hour early. He told me the half hour was supposed to be him questioning me about various places I screwed up, but luckily I didn't.

That was the first and last time I felt really good during the day.

The next guy asked me to write a function that returns the intersection between two arrays. Well, obviously you can compare every element in the first array to every element in the second array, but this is slow. So I sat in silence for 5 minutes panicking and trying to figure out how I will ever do this in less than O(n²) time.

As I sat with my face in my palms, I thought, "This would be so easy if the arrays were sorted!" After a few more minutes of silence, he asked me if any constrains on the inputs would make the job easier. I didn't realize I could impose arbitrary conditions, but I said it would be easier if the arrays are sorted. That seemed to be what he was looking for, and it reduces runtime to O(n), which is much better. I spat out some code for this pretty quickly once I knew they are sorted.

His next task for me was to come up with test cases for the float atof(char* s) function. Let's just say I failed...

The fourth and last interviewer was some Asian manager dude. He asked me to write a C++ class that represents an integer without size constraints, i.e. it can't overflow in either direction. It needs to support all the regular integer operations (add, subtract, etc).

I failed... miserably...

Now I see why they let you spend $40 on dinner. It's so you can eat your mind off of how badly you got raped in the afternoon. It all makes sense now.

10:52AM

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