Palm Software Manager Interview

Interviewed Jul 2011 (took 4 weeks)

Most interviews in tech companies nowadays are ill designed by hot-headed coders - or not designed at all. Palm is actually better than most. At least they don't try to quiz you on sorting algorithms (or cryptographic hashing algorithms for a security job). They actually focused on the key factors that can make this job successful: experiences in dealing with security breach episodes, and ability to interact with other players in the organization. But in the end, they fell for it nevertheless - they asked about how certain Unix shell commands are implemented - this is what I call the "freshness of memory" questions. If you were someone happens to be working on that piece of code daily, you'd appear a genius. I told them I used to know when I was a Linux kernel developer years ago, or how I might approach it. But that's not good enough. With HP probably closing shop on WebOS, I won't mind too much.