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Comment by rcheu | Hacker News Reader

Was a long time ago so I don't remember them all, but some examples I do remember:

* Print pascal's triangle up to the n-th level, with proper spacing (so that it looks like a triangle).

* Make the game Go for 2 players. I got a sub problem of this during my Google interview (determine whether a piece is captured).

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When interviewing in tech jobs I had : - build an asynchronous communication queue from scratch (which implies building semaphores) - optimize the drawing of a sphere on a screen

the rest was more regular (I didn't apply to super elite jobs, and both the companies with these two hard tests failed, so it's no indication neither about them, neither about me)

> - build an asynchronous communication queue from scratch (which implies building semaphores)

How long were these interviews? Seems like something I could do in a few days not a 2-hour interview!

It lasted two hours. Now the way it worked was that I was doing on my own but I had to constantly explain to a "peer" my line of reasoning. So I was not alone in front of a white paper :-) This was an extremely interesting wy to interview. I felt I had the opportunity to demonstrate my skills on a difficult problem (which I didn't solve). I didn't remember the details of Dijkstra's algorithm but I had the opportunity to show that I can approach a complex problem in a logical and efficient way (well, that day, that kind of problem; don't ask me to work on helicoidal tomography :-))

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