More interview questions

The other day I spent a few hours talking to half a dozen folks at an interesting startup down the street. For the first time I saw people who actually run everything in the cloud (AWS in this case). And use a few languages including Scala. And Hadoop.

The interview was not particularly challenging (two people remotely over Skype video, one did not ask coding questions, one asked to whiteboard simple things) . A couple of representative code assignments:

• write a method to calculate the average word length in a string
• implement get/put methods of a hash map (no need to support resizing so pretty much an array of linked lists)
• Find the minimum Fibonacci number with a given number of digits, return the sum of those digits (i.e. for 3 digits the number will be F=144 and the sum=1+4+4=9)
  
• Implement thread-safe access to a queue
  

This time one of the interviewers wanted me to actually code instead of white-boarding. But he did not bother to tell me about it in advance so that I could have my laptop. You would not believe what a disaster it is to use Eclipse on Apple with no experience with either. Eclipse alone would have been a pain because its shortcuts are completely different from Idea. But Apple laptops don't even have some keys (e.g. PgDn) and have a different set of meta keys (e.g. Command and Control instead of Ctrl and Alt).

In the end they did not like me enough and I was less excited about them than I had though I would be but it was fun to talk to interesting people.