This company seems obsessed with employing academics! In my experience, academics rarely make great developers. This is just my opinion but I think companies like Google and Facebook can afford to employ academics to thinking about algorithms and data structures all day. The average companies need developers which can deliver working maintainable software, on time. You don’t need to be an academic to do this. The telephone interview is full of questions about data structures and complex threading questions which are rarely encountered in the real world. The interview process has no focus on a person’s experience or personal competency. Most interviewers will talk to you about your past experience, technologies you’ve worked with, difficult situations you’ve encountered etc. None of these types of questions will be ask. You will simply be asked to study as section of code which solved a problem you will never encounter in your working life. If you can understand it, you will most likely get the job.