The third interview was with a Software Engineer. He was actually one of the kindest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of chatting with. We went through a large number of algorithms and data structures questions, as expected. In the beginning, we went through a few problems that I had to calculate the runtime complexities for. We then went through a few more problems that I had to think of suitable algorithms and ADTs for. There was a discussion of HashMaps (again, as you’d expect), interfaces for a few typical ADTs in Java, packets, Web servers, protocols and a number of other things. In hindsight, it was certainly better going through lots of problems than focusing on just one, as was the case with an interview that I went through several years ago. In SE interviews, if you get stuck with a problem that you don’t know anything about, you’re basically done.