Well, I've been looking for a new job. I've had a number of interviews at quite a few different companies and I find it really interesting the differences in interviewing styles. I've begun to think that you can tell a lot about a job position by how the interview is and the types of questions you get. At least you might be able to tell the level of he people that you would be working with. I am a software engineer and so I get pretty technical questions that are all over the map. I thought it would be fun to write about some of these experiences, about some of the better and the poorer questions that have been thrown at me.

My most recent experience is with a web company that has a service oriented architecture strategy and is delivering a number of publicly available web services for a price. I just finished my third interview with them and I would say that the interview process has piqued my interest in this job.

My first interview I was asked a number of mundane web services types of questions, but the general structure of the interviews that this company does is to ask a couple of problems and see how you would solve them. Here are three of those problems:

1. File System - How would you build an application that needed something like a unix based file system? This problem was really looking for basic OO skills and how you would define an object hierarchy for the file system, including files, directories, sym links and permissions.
   
2. Large Dataset of 3D points - What type of data structure would you use if you had a large file (2-3GB) of data points that make up a set of points for a 3D object, and wanted to find the 100 points closest to the origin? This was really getting to datastructures and algorithms. This one in particular got into a Binary Tree implementation and how that worked and how you search and select values from a binary tree.
   
3. Mapping system - How would you design the data storage for a mapping system with all of the points on a map? How would you then figure out how to create directions from one point to another? The first question was getting at some basics around data bases and database design, ie, what would the tables and relationships look like for this type of system. The Second question was around algorithms for figuring out how to search and select from a large data set.

That's all for now. I'll post some other stuff later.

Blogger Beta SUCKS

I recently migrated to the new Blogger Beta, primarily because I didn't like having to go and add personal side bar links to the html template and then copy and paste it each time I wanted to change templates. Well that problem is fixed in the Beta, but there are hordes of other problems. First, the nice link between Picassa's "Blog This" button and blogger is now broken. I am no longer able to use Picassa to upload pictures, and this is a huge problem because my family blog is primarily pictures. Now I have to go through the painful web based screens to post pictures. This worked fine for awhile, but for the past few days I've been getting errors on the image upload page. It seems there are serious issues when a blogger is completely unable to post to a blog with images.

So I am a good citizen and wrote to Google to tell them of the issues that I was having so that they would be aware of them. I was told that those would be fixed someday, but were not high priority. So I asked to be migrated back to the non-beta version of blogger. I was told that was not possible. So here I am, stuck with a blog that I cannot use. Maybe I will begin to investigate other blog services out there that I can use.