Yelp Software Engineering Intern Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated May 8, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 9 ratings 
“Average” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 9 ratings
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| 1–9 of 9 Yelp Interviews | Sort by |
Software Engineer Intern at Yelp
Posted May 8, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Apr 2012 in San Francisco, CA (took a day)
There are two interviews. The first one was a hiring manager asking me some easy computer science problems. The second one asked me some specific problems about web development and asked me to write a real program. The first one took 20 mins, and the second one took 45 mins. There should be a last round, but I was rejected after the second interview.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineering Intern at Yelp
Posted Apr 26, 2012
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Mar 2012 (took 2 weeks)
The first interview was with a recruiter and had basic questions about topics in databases, datatypes and datastructures, security protocols like ssl etc.
Second interview was a skype interview with the engineer where i was asked to solve a problem where i was given a huge log file and the way id find the top 10 sites in them. Then asked a lot of javascript and datastucture questions.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer Intern at Yelp
Posted Mar 26, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Feb 2012 (took a day)
I was emailed to set up a phone interview within two weeks of submitting my application online. After sending them my availability, the interviewer responded a few minutes later saying he was going out of town the next day and asked if I could interview within the hour. Expecting a nontechnical interview, I said yes, and was bombarded by very technical questions, most of which I was completely unprepared for.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineering Intern at Yelp
Posted Mar 19, 2012
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2.0
Easy Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Mar 2012 in San Francisco, CA (took 2 weeks)
the phone screen interview was like the one in other posts. a list of questions.
three skype interviews. they all required coding on a google-doc-like platform. they love python so make sure you know your python. the questions are relatively easy compared to other companies in the area that i interviewed with.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer Intern at Yelp
Posted Mar 15, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Mar 2012 in San Francisco, CA (took a day)
First interviewed with HR and they gave sort of a basic technical interview. Passed and was scheduled a phone interview with one of their engineers. Interviewer was not very clear on what he was asking for in one of the questions so I was confused and thus, coded it wrong for what he wanted. But, everything else was correct. Sent an e-mail to HR regarding an update, but they have not replied. Seems unprofessional.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer Intern at Yelp
Posted Mar 14, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Feb 2012 (took 2 days)
The first interview was through phone and consisted of technical questions and some interpersonal ones.
He asked me questions like: why Yelp? grep questions? how many bytes are in an integer? what's the max number that can be represented using unsigned integers? explain with the most detail what happens in the background after a URL is put in the browser and pressed enter. some linux commands: pid. What's the protocol used in HTTP? What's SSL?
The second interview is throuh Skype. What's the most challenging thing you've done? What's the difference between a process and a thread? It's where memory and state is not shared and the other one is. Then through screenshare, he gave me this problem to code:
We have a fairly large log file, about 5GB. Each line of the log file contains an url which a user has visited on our site. We want to figure out what's the most popular 100 urls visited by our users.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer Intern at Yelp
Posted Jan 10, 2012 — 3 of 3 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2011 in San Francisco, CA (took 4 weeks)
The intern hiring process contains four interviews in total. The first interview is often conducted by a recruiter. The recruiter will first chatted with you about your background. And then conduct a list of screening questions. Most of questions are very "simple" & "straightforward". He basically (I guess) had some answer with his hand and compare your answer against it. For example, how many bits of an integer? What is the time complexity of searching in a linked list? Do not try to explain your thought or partial answer because this is apparently just a screening, and he/she is a recruiter, not an engineer. I got stuck at few questions and I try to explained what I know and ask for more clarification/hint but apparently he can't give you a hint or any help. We just move on.
Once you passed the phone interview, the next step is a 45 minute phone interview. I was interviewed by a software developer. They starts with your resume, discuss projects you done, your publications(papers, etc.), and I feel that he is more interested in knowing who you are and what's your background. They will throw questions related to your resume and past projects. For example, he randomly picked one of my former project and ask for more details, my role in the team, etc. It's just like a regular "tech" interview, keep throwing you CS problem, in particular, algorithms & data structure. Interesting enough, I was not asked to "actually" write code for anything. My interviewer is happy with a high level pseudo-code and we move on.
Few days later the recruiter contacted me again and scheduled another 90 minutes back-to-back phone interview. The first interviewer is a senior engineer, and the second interviewer is a tech manager. They had a video skype meeting with me and we can see each other. (So don't be naked). The interview process is very tense. Both interviews started with projects you did before. Then, they try to understand why you are a good fit to the company (I guess). The tech parts involves lots of stuff. It's not (purely) code tests because they throw your many questions about operating system, databases, linux, python, etc. Yes, they were trying to push you to the limit. Also, I was asked to implement a "modified" data structure, so be prepared of writing codes. The coding problem is reasonable. No brain-teaser questions nor fancy questions that test your IQ. Of course, you have to write code neatly and quickly (not pseudo code).
These topics are covered in my interviews:
- operating system, process, multi threads, memory models
- database, in particular, SQL language
- scripting language: python (but I think answer in perl may be okay)
- data structure & algorithm: stack, linked-list, hashmap, tree, heap, etc.
- security (attacking, encryption, etc.)
- web standards/protocol: http, dns, tcp/ip, ssl, etc.
- recursion and/or dynamic programing
- linux knowledge/commands
To sum up, I think they tend to ask you "many" tech questions that can be answered in few minutes. So it's a "broad" test but not just a problem-solving "coding" test. Overall the interview process is very good. The only thing I don't really enjoy is that they interview you via Skype. In a large room without a headset device, the echo could be bad.
Interview Questions
Negotiation Details
They will try to match as close as other offer(s) you got, but will not top on it.
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineering Intern at Yelp
Posted Dec 16, 2011
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2011 (took 1 week)
My only gripe is that the engineer I interviewed with first told me not to worry about any language API limitation, but during the interview, told me that doing something would violate a language construct and I couldn't continue with that part of the solution. I agreed because I wasn't positive if the API would allow it, but in any case, I wasn't trying to do some black-box magic 'this function sorts an array in constant space' kind of thing, so it shouldn't have been alright. Turns out that what I was trying to do was perfectly legal within the API, so I really didn't violate anything. Anyway, that bad info forced me to write a solution in O(nlog(n)) space when I could have done it in O(n).
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineering Intern at Yelp
Posted Nov 17, 2011 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2011 in San Francisco, CA (took 2 weeks)
When I was asked for my availability for a phone interview, it took them a long time to respond. It seemed like the person who interviewed me didn't really have any technical experience, and was reading questions off a list. I tried to walk through my thinking with a few of the questions, but it seemed like the only thing that mattered was the exact right answer. I was expecting more algorithm-based questions, like how to efficiently do a certain task... instead, all they asked me were very low-level, language-specific questions that I feel like one doesn't really need to know off the top of their heads.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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