Apple, Google, Microsoft IT Job Applicants Tell All

by Don E. Sears

“If you are asked to design an elevator, what are things to consider?” — Amazon.com Project Manager”Given two strings, determine if the two words are anagrams. Explain the complexity of the solution using the Big O Notation.” — Amazon Software Development Engineer

“There are three boxes. One contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled such that no label identifies the actual contents of the box it labels. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?” — Apple Software QA Engineer”Describe the most challenging work situation you’ve faced and how you resolved it.” — Apple Project Manager

“Why are manhole covers round?” — Cisco Systems Commodity Manager”Tell me about a time you had to negotiate conflict on a project.” — Cisco Systems Program Manager

“How do you handle reuse in Web applications?” — Dell Web Applications Developer”If you were going to launch a smartphone into the market, how would you do it?” — Dell Senior Product Manager

“Given an array of integers, find the maximum number that can be reached by summing the best possible consecutive subsequence of the array.” — Facebook Senior Software Engineer”How does Facebook compare to its competitors?” — Facebook Fraud Operations

“You’re given a string, and you want to split it into as few strings as possible such that each string is a palindrome.” — Google Software Engineer”Explain how a Juniper router selects the best path (BGP).” — Google Network Engineer

“What would you do if the client keeps asking for more and more functionality on a project that is already under way?” — Hewlett-Packard Information Systems Analyst”Describe an orange.” — Hewlett-Packard Software Engineer

“What can you bring to IBM that we don’t have?” — IBM Information Technology”Describe a program that can choose the shortest path among few paths between two points.” — IBM Systems Engineer

“How would you design a simulator like verilog?” — Intel Design Automation Engineer”How would you find out the middle element in a singly linked list with just one pass through all the members?” — Intel Design Automation Engineer

“Find the closest predecessor of a node in binary by doing in order traversal.” — Microsoft Software Development Engineer in Test II”Find the anagrams in a dictionary” — Microsoft Senior Engineer

“What are the potential issues or limitations when migrating from Hibernate to JPA?” — Oracle Lead Software Engineer”Which data structure is one of the most common sources of Java memory leaks?” — Oracle Senior Software Engineer

“What is the most efficient way to swap the numbers from left to right? For example: 1234567 if giving the k = 3, the result should be 4567123.” — Yahoo Software Engineer”Estimate the volume of water on the Earth.” — Yahoo Senior Product Manager