Yahoo Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – I was contacted by a recruiter.
everything was done professionally.
i was challenged by some very smart people.

Interview Details – Interviewed for backend position.
Phone screening was mostly revolved around servers scalability issues and connection stacking.
Personal interview is mainly based on my previous projects and technologies.
Whole experience was smooth

Interview Details – Very important: I had 2 interviews for 2 separate positions. In one I was interviewed by random people, and the other I was interviewed by my future team members. Guess which one game offer? The one where team members did interview.
Phone interview consisted mostly of Java core questions and may be be some threading. Was interviewed by my future manager.
On site, got interviewed by many people:
1) Javascript - language knowledge, and I think solve a problem
2) Java - language knowledge, and I think solve a problem
3) Threading, general how would you design a system.

No Google/Microsoft type questions.

When I was already working at Yahoo my team members when did interviews asked to solve real life problems which we had in our product and then saw if that matched our solutions.

Good to know things: design patterns, threading, when you choose your language then tricky things in your language: example: PhP (magic methods), Javascript (closures, vardiac functions), Java (inner classes)

Interview Details – I was contacted by a hiring manager to go over my background and some screening questions such as race conditions, deadlocks, some C++ questions etc. He told me he'd like to schedule an on site interview - which was setup by their HR folks.

The onsite interview was a underwhelming. The guys supposed to interview me were not on time. One interview related to software design (patterns etc.) went really well. Second interview was more focused on C++ internals and other coding which went well. Interview related to data structures and algorithms was my weakest. I also met a director of engineering and had lunch with him. That also went fine.

Overall I thought their screening process could have been better. They were looking for some one well versed in web technologies and with expertise in algorithms whereas my past experience is in firmware, middle-ware and UI for handsets. I thought it was wastage of time for both parties and I had to burn a day of vacation.

They were right to not make me an offer. It was a bad match for both parties. I wish I had probed more to ensure that it was going to be something I would like to do and would match my skills.

Interview Details – Phone interview was more about specifics of Java/J2EE technology.

1. What's the diff between interface and abstract class
2. Implement Fibonacci series. Can you implement the same using recursion? Which one is more efficient? why ?
3. What are the steps involved in creating a complete workflow of a module in Spring and Hibernate
4. What is dependency injection? Why is it good?
5. Explain many-to-many mapping concept using Hibernate
6. Write the query to find duplicates

1:1 interview had 3 rounds
1. You have a Employee class and Dept class. Give a complete design and implementation to get all Employees grouped by Departments
- Many-to Many mapping again with spring injections, they also checked why would you use certain data structures

2. Second round was based on the Producer Consumer problem and involved many threading concepts

3. Third round was based on design and performance oriented thinking. Let's say you had a 10Gigs of a text file and you were to collect a certain pattern of string and store it in DB. What was the most efficient way of doing it ?

The advice is:
Be good in Collections, Threads and Performance related questions

Work culture is good but very hectic. Agile, scrum methodologies are followed and there are pretty stringent deadlines. People are co-operative but one must have a lot of energy to find your way through gigantic code base and slightly complicated procedure to build and test the code. Good luck.

Interview Details – Recruiter introduced me to the hiring team. There's a team of people dedicated to hiring at the time. Initial phone screen was pretty easy. Onsite interview consists of 5 people. A lot of grilling from 3 out of 5. The other 2 are more behavioral.

Interview Details – I got a call from a software developer who spoke in a monotone, was difficult to understand and hung up on me without saying "bye". He didn't want to tell me about the position and always wanted to call back. I gave up and e-mailed him that I wasn't interested. Two weeks later, a Yahoo! recruiter contacted me, asking if I heard from anybody at Yahoo! yet and if I was still interested. I was still interested but was not interested in that first software developer. I got an e-mail from a second software developer with a vague job description for the Yahoo! Mail group which was looking for anybody from a rock star new grad to somebody with 15+ years of experience plus "only true ninjas need apply" (exact quote). I got a call from the second software developer. He was pleasant and asked me basic questions about Java interfaces, Java static members, Java inheritance, JavaScript innerHTML, JavaScript document.all, design patterns and big O notation. I answered all questions but told him that big O notation and design patterns were not very interesting to me so he asked very few questions on those topics. A day later, I got an e-mail rejection from a person in HR. I wrote a followup e-mail to the second software developer but no response yet. My general impression is that Yahoo! has Google-envy: they want to build a rep where their hiring process is needlessly long, illogical, arbitrary, rude and obscure so they can be just like Google!

Interview Details – While happy with my current job, I got connected to the recruiter through LinkedIn who forwarded my resume to one of the teams. I had a phone interview with Yahoo! Mail Search team. Questions asked were something like finding possible substrings in the string and some C++ concept questions. The interviewer was the worst interviewer I have ever experienced. I was pretty sure that she didn't bother going through my resume before the phone interview. She was very rude and was not paying attention to my answers. At the end, we ran out of time and she didn't let me ask questions because she was in hurry to get off the phone.

Interview Details – First I had a phone interview. In the interview, interviewer asked C++ questions and puzzles. C++ questions were easy (standard questions) and puzzles were little difficult and I never expected puzzles in the phone interview (huh... wasting your minutes by thinking a solution to the puzzle??? ). Anyway, I solved 2 of 3.