Job interviews with Taggle.com and Yahoo!

It has been a while since I thought of writing my previous job interview experiences with different companies.

Taggle.com came to our campus in month of July 2010. It was CTO, Tej Arora who came to the campus for the recruitment. First of all there was a Presentation about Taggle Internet ventures and how it works.

Taggle.com is a group buying website where you get goods for reduced prices, with greater than 50 % off when there are a group of people to buy it. We had a objective multiple choice test of around 40 questions. It consisted of few aptitude questions, data structure questions, etc. It was a good question paper. By evening 5 pm, the result of the technical test came out. There were around eleven guys shortlisted for the next programming test. The eleven selected candidates were send for the programming round. We were allowed to write code on our own laptop and use any programming language we liked. He gave us two set of questions. Set 1 consisted of 1 difficult question and other set consisted of 2 easy questions. We were able to choose one set for coding. I chose the question to implement text auto completion functionality (set 1) and wrote the code in Python. He verified my program and told me to wait and come back once the programming round is completed by others. My friend Fayaz also had written autocomplete functionality. There were other two girls Nishita Suresh and Legena P.K who had worked on the other set of problems. Four of us had personal interviews. He didn’t ask me any technical interview questions but we had a very friendly conversation about the work and benefits at Taggle Internet ventures.

Once interviews were completed, the results were announced. Fayaz and Me got placed in Taggle.com.

Yahoo! came to our campus on October 30th, 2010. It was a day before seventh semester university exams started. Yahoo was considered as the superstar company that comes to MEC campus with highest pay and perks. The day when placement cell announced ‘Yahoo’ is visiting campus, everyone looked with wow. Placement cell members gave us the info that Yahoo! is going to recruit for Service Engineering team where they look for guys who live and feed in UNIX environment. In the following days placement cell posted specifications and info on what they are looking for and their requirements. There were a lot of XMECians working in Yahoo and they send us some materials they studied during their time. Everyone started seriously preparing for Yahoo with lot of effort. I also wanted to get into Yahoo. It was the time I was working on my book and I had hectic schedules. Some of my seniors who got into Yahoo were famous for Shell Scripting and sed. So I had thought of seriously looking into SED. I spend few days on SED and AWK. It was really nice writing sed scripts, which looks very awkward but performs incredible text processing operations in single line of code. To brush up my shell scripting skills, I went through the first draft of my incomplete book. But, that helped me a lot to fix bugs in my book. I also brushed up few conceptual things like How E-mail works, Networking basics, etc. The day of Yahoo interview came. The cut-off percentage was 70%. There was a presentation on Yahoo! and what they are looking for? Benefits and perks at yahoo. Then we attended the screening test. The test consisted of few aptitude questions, lot of Perl questions, networking questions, questions from OS scheduling, SQL and few other things. But it was not that difficult. After the test, in about an hour the results were out. 15 guys were in. The next was programming round.

They gave two questions, To write an intruder detection system script by parsing the auth.log log file and program for generating random sequence of n numbers from single random seed. I wrote the script for intrusion detection and basic implementation of random sequence generator (I had uncertainty about the question and what I had done was slightly different from what they had meant). After the programming round, they shortlisted four candidates. Joju John Joseph, Subeen N, Neha Mahadevan and me. They announced that there will be three rounds of interviews (two technical and 1 HR round).

My turn for the interview came. They scanned through my Resume and were impressed with my work and Book. Interviewers asked about my interests. I told them that I live in GNU/Linux. One of the interviewer asked me to narrate the story of a computer from the time we press power button until it boots up. I had a long narration of the story of computer boot ups including in-depth explanation of Ramdisk and all (Actually Linux boot was one of my favorite things which I had worked on). Then he asked few questions like What happens when a user browse a Web page, DNS query, DNS records, and few other questions. The interview went through topics like GDB, Core file, Debugging, Killing processes, Init, Signals, Orphaned processes, SSH, SSH Auto-login, and many other questions. I don’t recall most of them. At the end of the interview, they told that they were pretty impressed and satisfied. The next round of interview was HR interview. It was very friendly in nature asking me usual HR questions. He was busy noting down my details on a form during the interview. After the HR interview I went for the second technical interview. They told that there is nothing to ask and we were having friendly conversation about college and environment. The interviewer told me about his college, Yahoo recruitment experience and few things about work environment. When my interviews were over, I had to wait outside with Placement cell volunteers until the three rounds of interview gets finished for other three guys. It took lot of hours. Finally they announced the result. Joju John Joseph and I got the placement offers for Service Engineering team. Neha and Subeen got internship offers.

I will write about my Zynga interview experience soon. Stay tuned!