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Yahoo Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

Getting the Interview  21 Interviews

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Interview Experience  20 Ratings

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Updated Feb 14, 2013
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Interview Outcome:   All No Offer Received Offer

Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo

No Offer – Reviewed Feb 14, 2013

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

Interview Question – how to add all the numbers from 1 to N   View Answer

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Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo

Declined Offer – Interviewed in Sunnyvale, CA Jun 2010 – Reviewed May 17, 2012

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 Question – How to deal with the scenario of connection stacking and number of open connections in a mail server?   Answer Question

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Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo

Accepted Offer – Interviewed in Sunnyvale, CA May 2010 – Reviewed Apr 8, 2012

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 Questions

  • Function in Javascript with variable number of arguments, what are closures?   Answer Question
  • How would you deal with multiple threads coming from UI into your middle tear layer of Model-View-Controller architecture   Answer Question

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Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo

No Offer – Interviewed in Sunnyvale, CA Aug 2011 – Reviewed Aug 3, 2011

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.

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Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo

Accepted Offer – Interviewed in Santa Clara, CA Dec 2010 – Reviewed Apr 20, 2011

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 Questions

  • Why constructors dont return any value. What problem did Java face in returning a value from Constructors ?   View Answer
  • Give an implementation of Moon in the solar system   Answer Question

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Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo

Accepted Offer – Interviewed in Sunnyvale, CA Apr 2008 – Reviewed Aug 6, 2010

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.

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Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo

No Offer – Interviewed in Sunnyvale, CA Jun 2010 – Reviewed Jun 2, 2010

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 Questions

  • What is a static method in Java and how does it differ from a non-static method?   Answer Question
  • What is a Java interface and how does implements differ from extends?   Answer Question
  • What is a design pattern? Name and describe one or two design patterns.   Answer Question
  • Do you know what big O notation is?   View Answer
  • In JavaScript, what is innerHTML and what do you use it for?   Answer Question

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Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo

No Offer – Interviewed in Sunnyvale, CA Feb 2010 – Reviewed May 20, 2010

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 Question – write a program that finds all repeated substrings in the string and provide the complexity of this program. how can you make it to perform better in time and memory?   Answer Question

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Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo

No Offer – Interviewed in Sunnyvale, CA Feb 2010 – Reviewed Feb 23, 2010

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.

Interview Question – What is a Copy Constructor, Virtual functions, destructor etc.   Answer Question

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Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo

No Offer – Interviewed in Santa Clara, CA Oct 2009 – Reviewed Nov 9, 2009

Interview Details – the phone interview was quite easy. Standard algorithm questions. Questions on threads, performance analysis of c++ processes on unix / linux systems and some c++ questions on pointers.

The 1:1 interview was little more theoretical on design patterns, and object orientation. I was also asked to design a class and asked to compare c++ v/s java. Other folks asked about my past experiences and how I solved some problems in the past (situational/behavioral).

Interview Questions

  • benefits of object orientation? Why object orientation? Expect very specific responses.   Answer Question
  • Design patterns - names of the specific patterns, and their abstraction and their higher level groupings, names etc.   Answer Question
  • Exception handling in C++, object splicing, and stack unwinding.   Answer Question

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