I applied through college or university. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Tripadvisor (College Park, MD) in Feb 2013
Interview
I initially met the TripAdvisor recruiters at a Career fair at UMD, College Park. They liked my resume, and invited me to a 15-minute (surprisingly short) technical interview the following day on the spot, where the tech guy (there was only 1) asked me to solve one question on a board - how do you reverse a singly-linked list? He was very up front and didn't ask nor allow questions as he was "short on time", which rather frankly, I found very rude. Overall, it was a mediocre experience, they seemed like they wanted to screen potential interns very rigorously and therefore had a worklike attitude
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Reverse a singly-linked list given a Class Node with data, and a reference to the next node in the Linked List
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Tripadvisor
Interview
After submitting a resume to an on campus recruiter, received an email for an interview. about The interview took place a week later following a short email exchange about scheduling. During a 1:1 on campus interview the interviewer asked a couple of questions on binary search trees: methods of traversing (breadth first vs. depth first) ) and implementation (how to traverse without recursion). The interviewer was very engaged, asked relevant questions and was open to questions about the company and the position. Overall, a positive experience.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Tripadvisor (Champaign, IL)
Interview
I visited the TripAdvisor booth at the UIUC Engineering Employment Expo. The team was friendly and allowed interested individuals to sign up for a walk-in interview the next day. So the next day I went and sat in the waiting room till I was called. I walked into a room with an interviewer and sat down with him. He first asked some general questions about my interests and any questions I'd have for their company. Then we dove into the meat of the interview.
The technical question was about Binary Search Trees, defining its components (Root node with 2 children nodes, a left and a right, that expands recursively and contains leaf nodes at the bottom level). The questions were conceptual and doable. Then he asked me to go to the whiteboard for a programming exercise. He asked me to create a function that would sum all the elements in the binary tree and return them.
Overall the interview was quality and not too difficult.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The most difficult question was when the interviewer asked that "if we sum up the elements in the nodes by first visiting the left subtree, then the middle, and then the right... what kind of traversal is this?"