Exploiting the phone interview for fun and profit
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I'm currenty employed full-time and recently gave a phone interview at one of
the reputed companies. I don't desperately need a job change, but just thought
that it would be a fun mental teaser. And if I get that free onsite that's even
better. I would only consider it though if the signing bonus amount is huge
which is always good to have. Since everyone knows how unpredictable these
interviews are, I decided not to prepare too much. Why waste time right ?  I do
work full-time in one of the Fortune 500s so, what the heck, I thought I might
be up for the game.  Plus I often come from the line of thought that if you
prepare well for 5-10 days and then forget all that you've learned, it's no good
(Do engineers that ace interviews know everything they've learned in their day
to day life ?).  So I wanted to test how much I knew or could recall from the
last time I prepared which was exactly 2 years ago.

So here I'm giving the first phone interview. I actually liked it as I had to
solve a string problem using hashmap. Never heard of the problem before so it
was exactly what I wanted, some live problem-solving to keep the mind sharp. I
came up with a solution and it turns out I've reached the optimum solution. The
interview continued more challenging question (in the eyes of the interviewer)
and I let him win, smiling all way, pointing out details which he ignored, but I
thought were quite important.  Overall, I felt nice.  I was scheduled for a
second round of phone interview soon.  Couple of simple questions and half way
through the interview I get stumped by a data structure question. I'd heard of
the data structure but never implemented it myself.  So I came up with the
solution but this time I made a mistake. If I could just fix two conditions then
it would work (that's what I did when I was a TA at least, deduct mark on how
much fixing I had to to). I haven't heard  the result of the inteview yet but I
will probably get a rejection.

This got me to thinking. What if I really needed that job ? I would have to ace
that second phone interview in order to get to an onsite round. How would I be
able to pass it without any hiccup. Is there a way to exploit it ? If
successful, most engineers could have a nice hotel for a day and a meal at
least. I'm sure most engineers deserve that if they had to give 1, 2 or 3 phone
interviews. You can talk all about how the phone interview is to determine the
fizz-buzz, cultural fit or other things, but it definitely does not take 2 phone
interviews (3 sometimes ?). Who is incompetent, the interviewee or the
interviewer, for not being able to decide ?  I remembered, few of my class mates
in grad school were invited for 4-5 onsite interview couple of years back. I had
barely managed just two onsite interviews after many phone interviews.  What
they did was basically help each other out during phone interviews, so they
would at least get to the onsite round. None of them were dumb but not so bright
either. However, they worked as a team all of them in the room with their
laptop, books etc hearing the interview in pin drop silence. I don't know what
happened on their onsite interview but they are all working for the top tech
giants today. I guess after a couple of onsite interviews you gain confidence
and practice to ace the onsite. This had raised ethical questions in my mind
back then but now I think this is what we do in the real job don't we ?
Whenever we search something and pick a solution from stackoverflow we are doing
the exact same thing, getting help. And we don't even give credit to the author
most of the time do we ?  If there are ethical issues, why do companies ask
technical questions in phone interview. Have they considered this scenario and
let it go or do they trust their future employees to be loyal and trustworthy
(nobody wants to start thinking someone is cheating). But there you go, if you
really want to ace that phone interview you could use this technique. Unless
there is a video conference of course, then you could just have two monitors
back to back. In the big monitor behind the laptop, open your favorite IDE and
have straight up implementation of handful of data structures which you have
coded before. These interviews are so straight forward these days (like
implement this, reverse this/that), if you just do the exercises before hand you
could easily just have a look at it and recite your own solution. That's the
problem though isn't it, the interviewers are asking the same questions again
and again and again. One time I had to explain the hashmap implementation to 3
interviewers for the same "reputed" company, that was a bit boring and I
politely declined the offer (difficult to stick to one's values and be jobless,
yet had to be done).

The nature of phone interviews have become a lot weird these days. Just grill on
the algorithms, data structure questions which is not so hard if you just
prepare yourself a bit. May be these questions are being asked because of
experience, may be because it's engineers who make the questions and not
teachers, who knows. I remember open book tests that we used to have where the
teachers used to ask very good question, if you flip the book you wouldn't have
time to solve them.  I often see today's phone interview process encouraging
rote mentality (and it's both ways, interviewers and interviewees). The more
capable interviewer also has a fixed set of question and answer that he/she has
prepared. So it's a very weird situation, you go a little bit up/down and both
of them don't understand what the other is talking about. I often like to smile
when that happens but then they don't see my face on the phone!
Exams/interviews should be fun where you come up with ideas to solve problem not
just display your rote power.

For all those hackers out there how do you feel about the interview process now
compared to a decade or two ago, specially the phone interview ?