A recruiter contacted me, mentioning he is following up with past CodeJam participants. While I am not really intending to change jobs at this point, I decided to take an interview. I talked with him on the phone and he asked simple questions (e.g., experience in developing mobile apps, intention to move to California, etc.). He introduced me another recruiter who is in Seattle. I talked with her on the phone and she scheduled an onsite interview at the Seattle office. I didn't have phone interviews, possibly because I have passed through ones in the past (rejected at onsite), or possibly because I'm currently working in Seattle and they don't need to reimburse for transportation and lodging. I had interviews with 5 engineers (+1 engineer for lunch). Questions were rather simple and with moderate difficulty. While I thought I did well on the questions, the recruiter called me a week after the interview and told me that the hiring committee decided not make an offer. As other people also say, they don't give me any feedback, but the recruiter mentioned it was "close", though I don't know if she actually had detailed information about my interview. What's frustrating and made me feel negative about the process is that they do not give me any feedback. I don't even know if it was because of my performance at the interview or because of my past experience (I'm not a software engineer right now and coding is not my main job responsibility). I explicitly asked this point to the recruiter but she didn't clarify. I'm suspecting it's the latter and if that's the case, this whole process was totally a waste of time, but I never know. Another reason for my negative feeling is that the recruiter left a message on my home phone saying that she needs to follow-up about the interview. The fact I was taking an interview was secret to my family and I've repeatedly asked the recruiter not to call my home phone, but she didn't care about that. This has brought a situation in my family, even bigger than the fact that I was rejected. Recruiters should be more careful about each candidate's privacy, though failed candidates may not be important to them.

Direct onsite because I interviewed in the past and did well that time. From the time I sent my resume to interview day: 2 weeks. From interview day to offer over the phone: 2 weeks. The syllabus for the interviews is very clear and simple: 1) Dynamic Programming 2) Super recursion (permutation, combination,...2^n, m^n, n!...etc. type of program. (NP hard, NP programs) 3) Probability related programs 4) Graphs: BFS/DFS are usually enough 5) All basic data structures from Arrays/Lists to circular queues, BSTs, Hash tables, B-Trees, and Red-Black trees, and all basic algorithms like sorting, binary search, median,... 6) Problem solving ability at a level similar to TopCoder Division 1, 250 points. If you can consistently solve these, then you are almost sure to get in with 2-weeks brush up. 7) Review all old interview questions in Glassdoor to get a feel. If you can solve 95% of them at home (including coding them up quickly and testing them out in a debugger + editor setup), you are in good shape. 8) Practice coding--write often and write a lot. If you can think of a solution, you should be able to code it easily...without much thought. 9) Very good to have for design interview: distributed systems knowledge and practical experience. 10) Good understanding of basic discrete math, computer architecture, basic math. 11) Coursera courses and assignments give a lot of what you need to know. 12) Note that all the above except the first 2 are useful in "real life" programming too! Interview 1: Graph related question and super recursion Interview 2: Design discussion involving a distributed system with writes/reads going on at different sites in parallel. Interview 3: Array and Tree related questions Interview 4: Designing a simple class to do something. Not hard, but not easy either. You need to know basic data structures very well to consider different designs and trade-offs. Interview 5: Dynamic programming, Computer architecture and low level perf. enhancement question which requires knowledge of Trees, binary search, etc. At the end, I wasn't tired and rather enjoyed the discussions. I think the key was long term preparation and time spent doing topcoder for several years (on and off as I enjoy solving the problems). Conclusion: "It's not the best who win the race; it's the best prepared who win it."