eBay Software Engineer II Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – Got a interview call after a friend of mine forwarded my resume. The phone interview went well and they wanted to come for onsite interview. It was scheduled with 6 people (multi team interview). Questions involved algorithms (trees, graphs), datastructures (hash maps, lists), problem solving skills. You better be good with all standard algorithms. When you specify some systems you worked on (like mysql, jboss etc), make sure you know how the competing technologies work too. One interview was totally writing code, interviewer explains a problem and I write code on white board. In fact all interviewed are white board, writing code, algos, explaining architectures etc. All the interviews went fine and I got a call Tuesday (interview was on friday) saying they want to go forward with offer.

Interview Details – Call from Director. He explained the position. He asked for couple of general quesions about industry and luckily he liked the answers and called for Onsite. Simple questions, from Algorithms, Sorting and Behavioral and puzzles. Got an offer next day.

Negotiation Details – I was new to this so i didn't negotiate much.

Interview Details – eBay always starts with a tough or in detail java related telephonic interview. To pass through this interview you just need to know few things like Java interivew questions (like what is static, finally and also some difficult onces like what is generics and stuff), simple database questions (like query using group by), normal web related questions (what is HTTP and explain end to end working of the website request by browser). I think telephonic interview is easy to crack.

When it comes to onsite interview. Everything revolves around data structure according to me. They will expect you to code the programs at all times. give your best shot and groom your programming skills well before going to onsite interview at eBay.

Overall it was friendly and helpful environment during interview at ebay.

Negotiation Details – they dint negotiate at all. either you take it or leave it.. thats it

Interview Details – The technical recruiter of eBay contacted me for this position. I did some research study for eBay in 2007 and they said they found my resume in their internal database.
I was busy preparing for an interview for another company the next day when the recruiter called. He called at 5.00pm and asked me if he can take a quick phone interview. I said yes, and he spoke to me for 20mts. He asked me about my previous job role, skill set and some basic questions from my resume and then started the technical round.

1. Can you tell me the code to create a linked list? (Yes, on phone :)
2. Singleton Pattern.
3. Stack and Queue differences
4.. Generic question on how will I react in team conflicts etc (more of a personality question)
He wanted to ask some SQL questions as well but we ran out of time.

At the end of the interview he said he was I am a strong fit for the position and he would recommend me highly to the hiring manager.

He called me the next day to schedule a phone technical phone interview with one of the Sr.Software Engineers in the team. It lasted for 45mts. The questions were:

Difference between hashtable and hashmap?

What if the main method is declared private?

What is the difference between == and .equals()

Difference between final and finally

What design pattern would you use to design connection pooling?

Why doesn't eBay use EJBs, Hibernate, Spring, Transactions?

Heard of command pattern?

What can you tell me about Garbage Collection?

Explain Singleton Pattern

Design a data model for a departmental store. Once I told him the tables, constraints etc he asked me to tell him the SQL to retrieve the total amount for all the orders a customer placed in various departments.

The next day the technical recruiter called me and said they want to get me in for an in person interview. I had a 2 hour interview scheduled with the following members of the team:

1. Tech lead
2. Front end engineer
3. Business Analyst
4. Sr.Engineer from other team - he was not able to make it so the team's Product Manager came in his place
5. Dev Manager
6. Technical Recruiter - for closing discussion

The tech lead asked me a few Java programming questions. He got some code samples and asked me to tell the output of the code snippet. They were based on HashMap initialization in the constructor, static factory method, main method and another class method.

He asked me to write some queries given two tables. Basically they were trying to see if I can join tables, use groupby and having clause, aggregate functions etc.

The front end guy came with a print out in hand. It had a UI page with name, password, address, comments (text area) and 2 buttons (submit and cancel). He wanted me to write HTML code for the UI of that page. He asked some questions on the HTML tags I was using.

He asked me questions on JavaScript, CSS based on the creation of that form. He asked for client side validations of the data fields (text fields, text area and address fields). Address Field validations were a little tricky as we need to mention the difference between PO BOX and regular address validations.

The Business Analyst asked me questions on my previous projects and how I handled the business requirements. He asked me very specific questions to the projects I did before.

The product manager walked through my full resume, discussed about almost every keyword I mentioned in the doc. Nothing very technical but did discuss a lot about the technologies used etc..

Dev Manager - He was a database guy. He told me about the team, what to expect etc.. Then asked me to come up with an algorithm to find out the price for a keyword of an item based on the values present in the existing tables. He gave me 2 tables and some columns with item details. Keywords to search for those items etc.. The keywords can have multiple words. For example if you have existing high volume keywords in the the table like iPOD with a certain price then how much price should be the phrase "iPOD Touch 8gb". He was looking for some 5 criteria in the algorithm.

The technical recruiter asked me if I had any questions.

Negotiation Details – I was able to negotiate the salary a little. They said they had a range for this position and cannot offer more than that. But my requirements were met including the bonus. eBay always takes you one designation lower to your current position or the market standard. And it is very difficult to get promoted as they do a percentile of all the employees of your level across the organization and unless you are an ace inventor kind of guy or you have a very good manager you can talk about you really well you cannot expect to be promoted in the first 2 or 3 yrs of your tenure at eBay. So try to negotiate for the higher position than they are offering if you are confident you can deliver.