I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Forcepoint (Austin, TX) in Mar 2016
Interview
Got a response from my application within a week. Interview was scheduled for another week later.
Interviewed with the Director of Software Engineering in Austin, Texas. We met in a small interview room with a white board. The interview started out with going over my resume. There seemed to have been some confusion about my graduation date even though it was on the resume so I think this may have influenced the decision to not give me an offer.
The interview consisted of 3 questions: Write a program on the whiteboard, Solve a logic puzzle on the whiteboard, write a program on a laptop.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a program on the whiteboard such that sum(n) returns the sum of all the numbers up to the nth number in the sequence {0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ...} (I noticed that this was the Fibonacci sequence but he did not call it that).
Given 9 balls designed to be identical, what is the best method to find the faulty ball in the least amount of steps given only a balance scale. That is, you have 9 balls and one of them is either heavier or lighter than the others.
Write a simple calculator program that allows a user to give an input (example: 5*3+4/3-4*1) and the program computes the integer result accounting for order of operations (example: 5*3+4/3-4*1 = 15+0-4 = 11)
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Forcepoint (Los Gatos, CA) in Jan 2015
Interview
Phone interview with the director of SWE followed by an on-site where I was interviewed by two principal or sr. engineers, followed by the sr. SWE director from the phone.
The first guy asked me if I knew any algorithms, which I really didn’t for the most part because I majored in EE. I wrote out the only way to sort I could think of off the top of my head which turned out to be bubble sort.
Second guy asked me some interesting questions about memory and using the & operator (in C) in various ways to ask me what the line of code was referring to in terms of memory . I don’t remember the specifics and I think I got a question partially wrong, but I was curious about that part so I asked him about it and later he told me it was that curiosity that made him hire me. He proceeded to mentor the heck out of me and make me basically the SWE I am now.
The big boss man asked me some “outside the box” questions like how to cut a cake into 8 even slices making only three cuts.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you cut a cake into 8 even slices, without stacking them, making only three cuts?
