It began with email correspondence / introduction, then a phone screen with recruiter, and finally a 45 minute technical interview with an engineer that included coding exercises. The phone screen was laid back and informal. The technical interview was over the phone with a collaborative web text editor for coding exercises and was fairly difficult. The whole process was almost two weeks long.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
From a tree, get a List of a List of Integers where each List of Integers corresponds to all ints at depth i from the root.
I applied through college or university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Quora, Inc. (Mountain View, CA) in Feb 2014
Interview
There was one on campus interview lasting 45 minutes, and then ~6 hours of on site interview at their headquarters.
The on campus interviewer was nice and was an alumni. He asked some interesting questions and gave good feedback. Questions were interesting and challenging, but not tricky. I appreciated that they focused mostly on coding and algorithms rather than math questions, this was true for the on site interview process too.
On site interviews lasted a long time. There were four technical interviews lasting around 50 minutes each including a practical interview where they had me hack on an existing code base. One of the interviews was mostly just talking algorithm design and I thought that was pretty fun. Overall a pretty well rounded interview process with good questions, it left me pretty exhausted though. No trick questions or brain teasers, just a bunch of real world-ish problems and traditional algorithm questions.
At the end there were a couple non-technical interviews that were much more relaxed where we talked about my resume and what I thought of Quora.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The practical interview section has you hack on an existing code base in Java/Python which wasn't something I'd seen before.
