I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at MathWorks in Mar 2012
Interview
Got an e-mail to schedule a phone interview the day after applying online. Questions were very general, and interview was very short, making it seem that they were more greatly interested in the submitted online material, and that the short interview was a company requirement and not an indicator of interest. Was told that I would be notified for a technical interview within a week if they were interested. Did not receive contact after that.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What qualities do you possess that would make you especially effective as an intern in this sort of position with our company?
The interview was challenging involving the team leaders & the manager in individual sessions & then a group session with everyone involved including a current graduate who took turns to ask interesting questions.
As well as two average algorithm questions, the technical interview also asked three easy math questions. One commonsense question, one permutation question and one calculus. One of the coding questions was the classic fibbonacci sequence.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write an algorithm for generating the Fibonacci sequence and how would you optimise it.
Broadly speaking, it consisted of a non-technical stage and a technical stage, all conducted via phone.
Non-technical stage included a chat with the equivalent of HR, finding out more about you and vice versa.
Technical stage was with a member of the team I would be joining, which was to find out more about my technical background. This included technical questions relevant to the work I'd be doing, in my case describing the inner workings of a particular process in detail.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe the steps in a typical gradient descent loop