Hulu Software Developer Intern Interview

Interview Details – A day before the interview, the recruiter informed me that I was to get code samples 20 minutes prior to the interview, and that such samples would be involved during it. This gave me a good sense of what to expect, and although I actually got the samples 5 minutes into the interview rather than 20 minutes before it, they were not amazingly challenging to walk through (not that they were cakewalks either, though).

The main questions the interviewer asks include what your interests are, what kind of work you've done in the past, and what kind of work you're doing now. In regards to the code samples, the interviewer asks you what name would you give to the unlabeled methods provided, how you would improve on them, what are the advantages of their current implementation over your proposed improvements and vice versa, and so forth. I would say the main challenge didn't really lie in how the code samples work, but on the improvement and comparison questions. One of the samples they gave me, however, was quite long, and, as such, was a little tricky to walk through. My advice if you see anything like that would be to carefully walk through the code, noting the purpose of all the methods involved (effectively, decipher the code piece-by-piece), to answer the interviewers question regarding it. This is regardless of how long you think it will take you to walk through the code, as the main idea is that the interviewer learns more about how you think.

From what I could tell from my interview and my further discussions with the recruiter, the software developers at Hulu seem highly proficient at what they do, and are very helpful in terms of informing you of what kinds of positions at the company you may want to take a look at, based on your interests and expertise. I also found the recruiter to be very helpful, as she was able to respond to my e-mails in a timely fashion (for instance, she responded almost immediately when I sent her an e-mail about my code samples not arriving in my e-mail inbox about 10 minutes before the actual interview).