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      Software Engineer Interview

      Mar 7, 2011
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      San Bruno, CA
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at YouTube (San Bruno, CA) in May 2010

      Interview

      A Youtube recruiter somehow obtained my resume and called me up to schedule a phone interview. The phone interview went quite smoothly - it consisted of a few background questions, some broad technical questions, and some more specific programming questions. For the last part, we used a shared GoogleDoc, such that I was able to type out my answers. I was flown out to the Youtube campus (they paid) and put up in a really nice hotel with a group of ~30 total candidates (for what it's worth, 90% of these were graduate students). We had a day-long group tour, including four 1-on-1 interviews, finishing with a dinner at a 5-star hotel restaurant. The 1-on-1 interviews all had at least one technical question, but the rest of the content varied depending on the interviewer. Some asked questions about spam prevention, others about memory allocation. There were no questions like "how many pennies can you stack end-to-end to the moon?" It's been almost a year, so I can't remember too many specific questions.

      Interview questions [5]

      Question 1

      Implement a malloc-like function such that it only returns pointers evenly divisible by N (presumably some power of 2). Use as little overhead as possible. Implement the corresponding free() function.
      Answer question

      Question 2

      Solve Youtube's comment-spam question.
      Answer question

      Question 3

      Rather straight-forward bucket sort question.
      Answer question

      Question 4

      Rather straight-forward hash question, touching on complexity, hash function distribution, etc.
      Answer question

      Question 5

      Garbage collection
      Answer question
      5