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Updated May 16, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 18 ratings

2.9

“Average” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 18 ratings

Positive	11%
Neutral	50%
Negative	39%

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4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jul 2011 (took 2 weeks)

Initially I had a phone screening for about 30 minutes. All the basics and fundamentals of java,db,frameworks were questioned.

Then there was a delay of 1 week and later I had a call for personal interview. I had 5 different people interviewed me. Most of the questions were on Algorithms,data structures , problem solving.

It was overall difficult interview and I didn't receive the offer.

Interview Questions

Questions on singleton, hashtables, problems on stacks, binary trees ,sorting .

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2010 in San Jose, CA (took 2 days)

Initial Phone screen
New Grad Position: Got asked on
Open Source contributions and
Reversing a cycle in a linked list.

Called on site:
Had 5 interviews:
Very Java Centric with some puzzles.

Some Questions:
1.Array Implementation of a Hashmap
2. what is static/final
3.Recursion :Fibonacci series,factorial
4.SQL , Joins
5. Interview with Principal, focussed on
object references and actual objects

Interview Questions

What is a object reference, how is it difference from a physical object?

Answer Question

Implement a fibonacci series recursively

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2010 in Pudong, Shanghai (China) (took a day)

I can't remember the details well. But the interviewer is nice.
It's 1:1 interview. First I introduced myself in English, then he asked me what I'm interested in and some programming questions.
My advice is: firstly you must be well prepared, self-introduction and something else; secondly, doing more practice, he will ask you a lot of practical problems.

Interview Questions

What is the difference of session, cookie and cache?

View Answers (2)

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview, an IQ/Intelligence Test and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

1.0

Very Easy Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 in San Jose, CA (took 2 weeks)

I got an e-mail from one of the recruiters. She setup a phone interview with one of their Engineers. The interviewer asked me random questions about Java, and J2EE, specifically, the differences between the two. The interviewer was happy and said he'd recommend me for the next round of interviews. The recruiter then contacted me again and asked me to send her a good day for another round of interviews. I e-mailed her my availability but she never replied. I tried to contact her several times but she never responded my e-mails. Very unprofessional.

Interview Questions

What is the difference between Java and Java Enterprise Edition?

View Answers (3)

Why is serialization called that?

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 in San Jose, CA (took 2 months)

Got a referral interview from a friend. Had a phone interview. Phone interview was very tough and a lot of java questions. there wasnt any response after that. I waited for almost 10 days and then mailed the person who interviewed me about response. In few minutes i got a response from hr to schedule a onsite interview. There was 5 people whom i met with in ebay office. Interview went positive and the team was excellent. Even before i reached home i got a email from hr that interview was positive and would give me a call on the following week day. There wasnt any call at all. Then a third party company mailed me to fill out application for background check. I did fill in application and they asked me some documents which i sent them. They told me my report will be sent in another 3-4 business days. I waited for almost 2 weeks and mailed hr if there is any updates. He told there is some kind of internal issues going on and he will get back to me on the following week. This has happened 3 weeks before and i haven't got any updates. I also mailed him last week to get updates but no response. So i am gonna accept offer from another company. good bye eBay!

Interview Questions

weak hash map, finally, finalize, final

View Answers (1)

thread local, java debugger

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Background Check.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Received and Declined Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 in San Jose, CA (took 4+ weeks)

I applied for a JavaScript Engineer position via a generic eBay "we're hiring!" ad on Monster.com.

I got an e-mail and a call quickly from an "outside recruiter" who bubbled about how eBay would do anything to recruit me. But, I've been around so I knew that this was just her job and a sales pitch. eBay hiring is an assembly line: an "outside recruiter" fills the interview funnel by convincing as many people to apply, "internal recruiters" get the resumes from the funnel and decide who to submit to their managers, "phone coordinators" spend all day arranging phone interviews between interviewers and candidates and "in person coordinators" spend all day arranging in-person interviews. So, you have 4 people whose sole job is to organize one portion of the interview. (At least, for the group that I ended up interviewing with.)

I had a 45-minute phone interview with a guy who asked technical questions but didn't make me write code. 20 minutes later, I had another 45-minute phone interview with a girl who asked me technical questions and had me write snippets of code in Google Docs. I did OK (not great) on the first and seemed to say "I don't know" a bunch of times on the second. I figured that I'd blown it and wouldn't hear back and moved on. A few days later, I got a weird call from the (internal) recruiter. They were eager to do an in-person interview but wanted to confirm that I'm interested in the position and that it wasn't too easy.

At the in-person interview, I walked past a big room. It had long desks with keyboards and LCD screens every 4 feet. Each "station" was separated by a separator mounted on the top of the desk. They explained that they are moving away from cubicles to this style which makes it look like a call center or like a study desk at a library with less privacy. But, no, it's not a call center; software developers work here.

Since the engineers have no privacy, I could look across the entire room and see something like 90% of the people were Indian or Pakastani or similar. Here and there, I saw a white or an Asian face but the vast majority were Indian and, during lunch, I saw a big group eating around the large break room table and every single one was Indian.

I had 6 interviews over 5 hours, 45-minutes each. The first guy was likeable; we discussed XSL (from my resume) and he asked me to write reverse a linked list. The second guy was odd, had a thick accent, and would pause for long periods, even though he hadn't finished the question; he asked me to describe (but not code) the maximum sum subsequence algorithm, how I could do the categories tab for eBay and how I would design a stock ticker. The third guy had me describe an algorithm to find the total number of matching pairs in an array. The fourth guy had a thick accent and asked me to write code to implement a queue. The fifth guy was the manager: we got lunch at the eBay cafeteria, came back to the room, talked about my background, then he asked me to work through the ABCDE x 4 = EDCBA. The sixth guy asked me about closure.

When the last guy walked me out, I asked how many interview he does. He says that he does about 3 interviews a week and, if I understood correctly, pretty much every week of his entire career at eBay. He's just a regular software developer so hiring isn't his main job. It shows that they do tons of interviews and it's pretty much an assembly line.

I felt that I did OK (but not great) at the interview but I strongly felt that I stuck out because I wasn't Indian. Everything about my interview felt like I was in India, not only the people but the culture, the way of doing business, the preferences, the interests, everything. Don't they realize that the perfect candidate would be Indian? Why not yield to the obvious and just focus on Indian candidates exclusively?

It seemed like a bad fit so I moved on. A few days later, I got a message on my voicemail and, when I called, they said that they wanted to make an offer. Uh, ok. They said that my relevant experience was not long enough so they'd like to bring me in at lower grade but, as the recruiter said, who cares as long as they can meet my salary demands, right? Uh, I suppose. We discussed my current salary and my salary goals then the recruiter said that she'd get me my offer by the end of the day or by the next morning.

No offer came and I moved on.

A few weeks later (after the holidays), a different eBay recruiter called me out of the blue and said that the same group wanted to offer me the job. He gave a pretty hard sell about all the intangible benefits of the job, like the cafeteria and job security and the eBay brand, so I figured that they were setting me up for a lowball offer. And I was right. They made me an offer and I told them the next morning, "Thank you for your offer but I've decided to decline." I did discuss the offer with my family but they were like, no way, no how.

Interview Questions

How would you write the code to reverse a linked list?

View Answers (2)

What complexity (big O notation) is reversing a linked list?

View Answers (1)

How would you write the code find the subsequence with the maximum sum of n integers?

View Answers (1)

How would you build a stock ticker service?

Answer Question

Find all the pairs in array that add up to a certain number?

View Answers (1)

Reason for Declining

The offer was about what I was making now but better benefits and a small amount of stock (maybe worth $5K a year) so I would have been a little better off. They also added a good signing bonus but, of course, that's just for one year. If they had given me a better offer, I'd probably have taken the job. But I actually want to work some place where I'm wanted; I felt that the lowball offer was because they didn't care if I joined or not. I also felt that I didn't fit in because there were so many Indians.

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 (took 4 weeks)

Interview process took long time first a phone interview and then face 2 face.They made a verbal offer but later no offer was made no reason was given. It was a time and energy waste from both end.I wish they could be more organized with their interview process.

Interview Questions

Java coding , datastructures, web based questions

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 (took 2 weeks)

Contacted by HR and got first phone interview scheduled. Had 2 phone interviews. One programming and problem solving. Second one specifically Java as the position was for a Java Developer.

Interview Questions

Immutable classes in Java

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jul 2011 (took a day)

there was a written test followed by two interviews.around 20 students were shortlisted from 250 students.the written test contained around 30 questions in which 20 were technical and 10 aptitude.In the first round they asked about skill set and asked to write a program on scheduling a cricket tournament.A second question was on permutation of strings.
In the second round the interviewer asked about OS,network programming and basic HR questions

Interview Questions

Progranm to schedule a cricket tournament

Answer Question

The operations of an operating system

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in San Jose, CA (took 2+ weeks)

I got a linkedin request from ebay hr for position available for Xcommerce one of their companies. I had a telephonic interview which went well and interviewee told me next step is we will ask you to come to San Jose. I did not heard back from them so mailed back. Now another guy calls me up to say there is position available for Quality Engineer right now not SE. I told I am not interested, I want to work in Product Development team only no QA stuff. Again they arranged for another telephonic round with another lead. That also went well, now this guy again arranged telephonic interview with his manager. That round was ok for me and did not hear back from them.

I still do not understand why I had three telephonic interview rounds, looks like the recruitment process is following any particular process.

Interview Questions

what is race condition, reflection, how can you instantiate object in more than one way. Dining philosophy scenario, diff between .equals and ==, which ds is used for maintaining connection pooling mechanism, sorting algorithm (how it works, how many times u compare and swap). diff between arraylist and linkedlist, wap to reverse string etc.

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