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      Mobile Software Engineer Interview

      22 May 2013
      Anonymous interview candidate
      San Francisco, CA
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Lookout (San Francisco, CA) in May 2013

      Interview

      So I just finished a entire interview sequence with Lookout and thought it would be good to recap the experience for future candidates who come along down the line. Here is the way Lookout prefers to do their interviews: an introductory conversation with the internal recruiter, two technical phone interviews which will involve coding in Collabedit, then two on-site interviews where the last on-site interview includes a technical presentation covering anything of the candidate's choice. Lookout takes up two floors of a building in the downtown Financial District, steps away from the Embarcadero BART station (i.e. relatively easy & straightforward to get to from the East Bay, and a short Muni Metro ride from the Caltrain station for those coming in from the Peninsula / Valley, and not really that far from the Ferry Building either). Lookout will soon be moving to a third floor. According to folks I spoke with, Lookout is currently at 193 employees where about 100 of them are engineering. The office layout is of the bare concrete floors, modern / minimalist, no cubicle, no privacy, long table variety. Everyone appears to be currently jammed onto the middle floor while the downstairs space is a larger kitchen and meeting space area. You'll be able to see natural light from almost anywhere where you're sitting in the building, although folks closer to the windows obviously get the spectacular views from the 27th floor. Theoretically real estate space will get a little looser once they open up the third, upstairs floor in the building. The day I interviewed, they were catering a fancy looking breakfast (Monday is "Frittata" day) and a diverse looking lunch spread (for an all-hands Engineering meeting). I vaguely remember somebody remarking that breakfast is catered at least two days per week. I'm not sure about the lunch situation, but there are all sorts of restaurants all around the area from which to choose from (one couldn't ask for a better location to work within SF). Water and soda and snacks are very freely available in the kitchen area and you can easily snag a bottle (or two) of whatever between sessions of spewing hot air in the interview room. When you step into the interview room, they'll hand you a interview schedule which may have slightly different interviewer names from the interview schedule they e-mailed you a few days prior (in other words, at least Lookout will be up front with who you will be speaking with; it may be worthwhile to look up their backgrounds on LinkedIn prior to arriving). If you ask for access the network (to demonstrate something or show off your portfolio hosted on some web server, etc.), you can get a business card with a password to the guest network. If your interview includes lunch, they may send you a menu and ask you to choose something. I'd strongly recommend going for the smallest thing possible or even **nothing at all**, because the last thing you want to do is have your mouth stuffed with food while trying to interact and/or explain some thing to your potential co-workers. In my interviewing day, I had four sets of one hour interviews. All of the Lookout folks I spoke with held their cards very close to their chest (in other words, I could not detect if they were pleased or dissatisfied with the way I was explaining things). Interviewers also didn't provide correction or unprompted guidance when I was accidentally making mistakes in my presentations (see next paragraph). As I was walking out the door, I pleaded with the seemingly-sympathetic internal recruiter to provide constructive criticisms to me if the team voted me down (I never look to debate any hiring manager on reasons why I get turned down, I just want some feedback to focus on so I could become a more appealing job seeker). And the very next day, he sent me the standard generic "Thanks for your interest. We've decided to go with candidates who more closely align with our business needs" turn-down e-mail. Intensely heartbreaking and frustrating at the same time. If I had to gamble who voted me down, my losing hand would be from the first set of interviewers (where I was describing how to find a winning tic-tac-toe grid): I was trying to get over my usual interview jitters and I carried on speaking pseudo-confidently while not carefully reviewing the white board where I should have realized I significantly flubbed up a few details in my scribbled code (I substituted the character "Y" in place of "O"-oh, for example). So now the feedback (which I worked up myself typing this review) is "stay calm & pay close attention to what you're writing on the board". Hopefully my experience flunking the Lookout interview will properly prepare for you to pass your interviewing day. If you find any of the information in my interview review helpful, please let me know by voting "Yes" on the "Helpful?" question below (this helps to motivate me to be as detailed as possible).

      Interview questions [4]

      Question 1

      Design an algorithm where you can detect a winning Tic-Tac-Toe game. Note: I heard anecdotally that their approach might instead focus on some card game (e.g. Poker or Blackjack or whatever), so be ready for shenanigans like this.
      1 Answer

      Question 2

      How would you implement a multiplayer Tic-Tac-Toe game?
      1 Answer

      Question 3

      Here's phone question # 1: What is an anagram? A word, phrase, or name formed by rearranging the letters of another, such as cinema, formed from iceman. Assumptions: 1) An anagram of a word is the same length as the word. 2) You can assume for this exercise that any word is composed of unique characters, i.e., only one occurence of any given character. 3) Assume all characters are lower case, if they are letters. Write a method that given a single word and a dictionary text file (csv of words), returns a set of all anagrams of that word from the dictionary. In: Word is 'act', CSV is 'tac, cat, taa, tact' Out: 'tac, cat'
      1 Answer

      Question 4

      Explain how the following two data structures work, and their pros and cons. 1) Hash table 2) Linked List (Unordered) bonus question (ugh): Why would you ever use a Unordered Linked List for storage of items?
      2 Answers
      41