The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Pocket Gems (San Francisco, CA) in Aug 2011
Interview
Pocket Gems came to my school as part of a job career fair, and I liked their presentation enough that I came to San Francisco to do a series of on site interviews. Some of the interviewers were really hard, but others asked a lot easier questions. It was a nice trip to SF.
Their office is pretty cool. I especially enjoyed playing pool with some of the other developers there.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Give an object-oriented design for the U.S. highway system.
Implement the data structures and algorithms for a binary search tree. Implement the add, remove, and change methods. Implement pivoting methods, too. Use this to implement a balanced binary tree.
The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Pocket Gems (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2012
Interview
I initially contacted Pocket Gems through the career fair at my university; I gave them my resume at that time. Shortly after that, they contacted me to schedule an initial technical interview with a software development manager. The first interview was difficult, but I apparently answered the questions well enough to be invited back for three more technical interviews with Pocket Gems software engineers. I went through a total of four in-person 1-on-1 technical interviews, each lasting approximately 45 minutes. After I completed those interviews, a recruiter notified me within a few days to notify me that Pocket Gems would be offering me a job, and a different recruiter contacted me a couple of days after that to give me the specifics of the offer.
My advice: the interview questions will be difficult, but be confident, explain your thought process well, and retain your composure even if you think the interview is going badly. You might be doing better than the interviewer is letting on.
The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Pocket Gems (San Francisco, CA) in Jan 2012
Interview
Pocket Gems did a presentation at our school's career fair. I didn't turn in my resume at the career fair, but I later applied through the website.
I had a phone conversation with a recruiter and we talked about what role was a good fit, and from his description, I thought that analytics work was the best. I've done some open source work on a server architecture very closely related to what they're using.
I had two technical phone interviews with programmers working on the server. The questions were mostly coding questions. We wrote into an online google document. It was hard to work without a real IDE and autocomplete.
They flew me to San Francisco for a day of interviews. The interviews were very varied, and I got to hung out with the team. They had a lot of games there in the office. We played foosball, ping pong, and billiards.
About a week later, they told me it probably wasn't a good fit. They seemed nice, I had fun, and I learned a lot while I was there.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Design a dictionary. Use object-oriented principles. What methods, variables, and classes would you use?
