Palm Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – 5 interviews, very secretive as they had not released their new OS yet. All about my experience and determining the fit with the new management team brought in from Apple

Negotiation Details – direct with the CEO - straightforward

Interview Details – I applied online. The recruiter from Palm emailed me to setup a phone interview with hiring manager. I got invited to an on-site interview one week later. The interview panel consists of 6 people, mostly QA and Dev. Total time is about 5 hours.

Interview Details – The manager was very friendly , the position was pretty demanding . They needed someone who could work late evenings and weekends sometimes. The position was interesting though .

Reason for Declining – Due to work hours

Interview Details – The interview was phone screen only. Went through the usual stuff first and then a technical question. Has some difficulties getting a grasp of the interviewer intention of the question. Question is quite simple.

Interview Details – I was interviewed by a very young team(all with similar names and all from a particular place in the world) .
Questions asked for kernel position:
- Write a FIFO
- Write memcpy
- Write a sub routine for the game GO
- Linked list questions

Does that look like kernel related questions?

I screwed up on FIFO and the GO game. The downfall could be because of that but I would never know.

Interview Details – An external recruiter called me up about this position. It seemed pretty interesting. Talked with the hiring manager on the phone screen and hit it off with him.

My on-site interview was the "gauntlet" type: 6 people. 1 Senior Director, 1 Architect, 2 Managers, and 2 underlings to give me coding questions. It was also split over two days (since I am gainfully employed!)

First day: Went pretty well, although I found out they had a copy of my resume with omitted my work experience at Apple...whoops! Talking to the director was a little difficult, since he was probing me on stuff I did at Apple, and forcing me to dredge up stuff I barely remembered. Oh well.

Second day: That's when they decided to haul out their heavy hitters. It didn't go so well.

First guy: an underling tests me by asking how to make a stack behave like a Queue. I gave the boiler plate answer. He then says how to make it better, to balance out the work done by the enqueue and dequeue operations. Got that too. Then he asks me a tree traversal algorithm. Got that.

Second guy: was supposed to be the hiring mgr, but he decided to take a ME day. Kinda poor form to skip out on me like that, IMO, but whatever. The replacement was another mgr, who worked in their applications group. Very good technically. I made the mistake of admitting my general disdain for the "const" attribute, and decided to exploit that like a sore wound. He also asks me to implement memcpy(). I resisted that too, knowing that's a question full of traps. He finally left, quite quickly, and without shaking my hand. I probably should have left right then.

Third guy: their Architect. First question he asks me: "Why Palm?" I don't think I gave the rah-rah answer he was hoping for. He then goes into C++, specifically: "how would I implement a smart pointer?". Thing is, I've seen that implemented in a prior company, and it SUCKED! I relayed my experience to the guy, and said I would rather use the Boost implementation of SP's.

He insisted I write something down, saying he'd like to see how I think. I kinda knew my goose was cooked, and should have said: "here's how I think: I'm a practical programmer, who prefers to use a solution that will work, and doing SP's is not motivating me". Things got frosty real quick between the guy and I...he then asks if I knew what a "Decorator" pattern is. I just said nope, quite flatly.

I asked a couple questions, and was escorted out, with a curt thank you.

During the interview, they kept bitching that they need help..well, they certainly didn't need mine, with the questions they were throwing at me, and choosing to chase me away.

S'ok, I still won't get one of their Pre phones...whatever lol

Interview Details – recruiter contacted. I took some time to reply. They did 2 over the phone interviews. Flew me in for face to face. It went on for all day. I was offered in next 2-3 days.

Interview Details – 2 phone interviews (each about 45 minutes) and 2 half-days face-to-face interviews (each about 5-6 hours).
Phone interviews: first one with a recruiter, the second one with the hiring manager.
Face-to-face interviews with future colleagues in related positions.

Interviews mainly focused on previous experience and relevant market/industry knowledge.

Interview Details – Very easy-going. Upfront about the problems that the company has (which are many). There are MANY Junior folks working at Palm and it show sin the quality of the work unfortunately. The more senior guys have their exclusive "boys club" which leads to a really terrible culture.

Negotiation Details – Don't by shy to make your requests heard. They will often bend to them if they are reasonable