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Pocket Gems Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

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Web: www.pocketgems.com | HQ: San Francisco, CA

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Updated Apr 11, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 8 ratings

4.4

“Very Difficult” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 8 ratings

Positive	50%
Neutral	50%
Negative	0%

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1–8 of 8 Pocket Gems Interviews

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5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2012 (took a day)

I had an initial informal interview with the campus recruiter who got me a technical phone interview. The technical interview was on the phone, was 45 minutes long, and consisted of two programming questions that were relatively easy. The recruiter was pretty friendly, and the interviewer was pretty cordial. I felt confident about the interview, but I was told I wasn't a good fit.

Interview Questions

given an array of n unsorted integers and each number is at most k positions away from its final sorted position, give an efficient sorting algorithm.

Answer Question

Do a postorder binary tree traversal with constant memory (no stacks).

Answer Question

Generate a fibanocci sequence: dach number is the sum of the THREE previous numbers

View Answers (2)

How to find the intersection of two lists?

Answer Question

Given a Fibonacci number, tell us which index it occurs at. (Ex: input = 2, output = 3)

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2012 in San Francisco, CA (took 3 days)

I met them when they came to my campus. I did an interview then and then flew to San Francisco.

Interview Questions

Copy a linked list.

Answer Question

Implement a controller for an elevator.

Answer Question

You and the interviewer play a game. There are piles of stones on a table, each with a different number of stones. On your turn, you can take from the table any positive number of stones from any single pile. The person who takes the last stone wins. What's your move?

Answer Question

Construct a SQL query to average the ages of all the people who live in a certain city who are above 18 years old.

Answer Question

What design flaws does the iPad have?

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Mar 2012 in San Francisco, CA (took a day)

It was normal for a tech interview. A bunch of algorithmy-type interviews. There were hard problems, but I don't think you had to solve them all to get hired. They called me a couple days later to tell me I got accepted.

Interview Questions

Shuffle a linked list in place. Make sure all shuffled final orders are equally likely.

Answer Question

Shuffle a 2-3 B-Tree in place. Make sure all shuffled final orders are equally likely.

Answer Question

Start iterating through the elements of a hash table in a random order. Make sure all orders are equally likely.

Answer Question

Search through a tremendous number of elements is a search space. I.E. You're asked to design a storage structure and search algorithm to search through 100 billion data records. You can have multiple servers and multiple threads.

Answer Question

Start with a planar graph input. Compute its planar dual.

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

View Comments (1)

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2012 (took a day)

I got the call through linkedin.
I had the HR screening, followed by the technical phone interview where I had to write code.
There was a huge gap between the two, I had other prior work commitments (releases). They were accommodating about that.

Interview Questions

Reverse a String

Answer Question

This was based on trees. Essentially it involved concepts about traversing a tree, storing required data in the right form of data structure and parsing it.

Answer Question

Prepare stuff on the big O complexity .

Answer Question

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Feb 2012 in San Francisco, CA (took a day)

Their interview was hard. I flew into San Francisco and stayed for a day at the office.

Interview Questions

Given two arrays of integers, find which number is present in the first array but not present in the second array.

Answer Question

Write a program to find all prime numbers up to a given number.

Answer Question

Implement an artificial intelligence to play Tic-Tac-Toe in the language of your choice. Pay special attention to the data structures and algorithms you use, and follow good software engineering principles.

Answer Question

What is polymorphism?

Answer Question

What is a copy constructor?

Answer Question

Negotiation Details

I didn't negotiate

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2012 in San Francisco, CA (took 2 days)

I did two phone interviews. I was really late to one of them, and I think that hurt my chances at passing them. The two guys I talked to were nice, but I completely bombed both phone screens. The interviews are really heavily into coding and algorithms and data structures.

Interview Questions

Insert a node to a SORTED link list.

Answer Question

Write a function to compute the quadratic formula.

Answer Question

Explain the difference between threads and processes.

Answer Question

Explain what critical section is. Explain what a dead lock is.

Answer Question

What is a wrapper class? What is a wrapper function?

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in San Francisco, CA (took a day)

I talked to a bunch of people on the phone. The recruiting team was very friendly and welcoming. I had a couple very hard phone screens before I came onsite. The team on site was really cool and we talked about what it is like to live in San Francisco. The interview questions were all technical and they all focused on engineering challenges of scaling a mobile engineering business. There was a lot of talk about good engineering principle and good design principle and how to ship quality software.

Interview Questions

Assume you have a method isSubstring which checks if one word is a substring of another word. Given two strings, use only the isSubstring method to check if one string is a rotation of another string. (i.e. "waterbottle" is a rotation of "erbottlewat".)

Answer Question

Give the data structures for a linked list. Write the code to add and delete a node from a linked list.

Write the code to remove duplicates from a linked list.

Answer Question

How do you find the kth last element in a linked list?

Answer Question

Implement an algorithm to find the middle node in a linked list.

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2012 in San Francisco, CA (took a day)

They have a room full of a lot of games, including a ping pong table and a really nice pool table. They had lunch onsite, and I had lunch with a couple other engineers there. It was ok. They have pretty nice facilities in the middle of San Francisco. It's close to BART. Overall, it seems like a pretty chill place to work.

Interview Questions

Use a single array to implement 3 stacks.

Answer Question

Implement a stack of plates. If the stack gets too high it might topple. Therefore, in real life, we would start a new stack when the previous stack exceeds some threshold. Implement a data structure called SetOfStacks that mimics this.

Answer Question

Implement Towers of Hanoi.

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

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Website www.pocketgems.com

HQ San Francisco, CA

Industry

Entertainment & Games Software

Size

100+ Employees

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The difficulty rating is the average interview difficulty rating across all interview candidates.

The interview experience is the percentage of all interview candidates that said their interview experience was positive, neutral, or negative.

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