This is going to be quick post. I was asked 3 questions.
1) Find the nth last node in a linked list. Had to write the code and read it.
2) Find the intersection of two sorted arrays. Again had to write code and read it. She also asked me to write test cases and complexity for this one.
3) Design a car rental system. I think I floundered here. I answered with three classes
a) class CarRental (will have an array of Car objects)
b) class Car
c) class Customer
It was a 45 minute interview and this was my second round. I wrote about my first phone interview here . Within one hour after this interview, I got a mail for scheduling 3rd round of phone interview. Usually with this company 2 phone interviews are norm, but I guess, they could not make a decision to call me on-site. Now waiting for 3rd round.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Mosque at Ground Zero
American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative are planning to build a mosque 2 blocks away from the Ground Zero. Their main aim is to promote tolerance among the Christians and Muslims. I don't think these people need to teach Americans about tolerance. It is because of their secular and liberal ideas that people of different faiths, races and color are able to thrive and make this country a prosperous one. As Thomas Friedman has pointed out in his nytimes article, if there is any place these people need to promote harmony among religions, it is not in the USA but in Saudi Arabia or in Pakistan. Can you imagine having a church in Saudi Arabia? Wiki entry on religion in KSA shows :
"Due to the legal framework of the country, which does not provide legal protection for freedom of religion, the public practice of non-Muslim religions is prohibited"
Democracies like USA, India give the right to people follow any religion and also the right to construct religious structures anywhere in the country (ofcourse within legal framework). Muslims in USA have every constitutional right to construct the Mosque at the proposed place in New York. But this is not about constitution or first amendment or legality of the mosque. Its about the sensitivities of the people who suffered in the ghastly 9/11 attacks. The attack was done in the name of Islam and having a mosque at that place would be highly insensitive. Infact having any kind of religious structure at that place would be wrong.
That New Yorkers have voted in favor of the Mosque shows the greatness of this country and the forgiveness of the Yankees. This should be a slap in the face of all those Islamic fanatics who claim that Western civilization is degraded (Iran president claims so. Have a a look at the link). Even though India is also a democracy and religions have the same rights as here in USA, I can say that Indians would have never accepted even a proposal to build a mosque in place of the destroyed Taj Mahal hotel in the Nov '08 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
So what should be built at Ground Zero? ASMA and Cordoba initiative may try to rebuild the World Trade Center twin towers. There can be a memorial, a museum, an educational institute...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordoba_House
"Due to the legal framework of the country, which does not provide legal protection for freedom of religion, the public practice of non-Muslim religions is prohibited"
Democracies like USA, India give the right to people follow any religion and also the right to construct religious structures anywhere in the country (ofcourse within legal framework). Muslims in USA have every constitutional right to construct the Mosque at the proposed place in New York. But this is not about constitution or first amendment or legality of the mosque. Its about the sensitivities of the people who suffered in the ghastly 9/11 attacks. The attack was done in the name of Islam and having a mosque at that place would be highly insensitive. Infact having any kind of religious structure at that place would be wrong.
That New Yorkers have voted in favor of the Mosque shows the greatness of this country and the forgiveness of the Yankees. This should be a slap in the face of all those Islamic fanatics who claim that Western civilization is degraded (Iran president claims so. Have a a look at the link). Even though India is also a democracy and religions have the same rights as here in USA, I can say that Indians would have never accepted even a proposal to build a mosque in place of the destroyed Taj Mahal hotel in the Nov '08 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
So what should be built at Ground Zero? ASMA and Cordoba initiative may try to rebuild the World Trade Center twin towers. There can be a memorial, a museum, an educational institute...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordoba_House
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
First Round Telephone interview
I had a technical phone interview and this was the first round in it. I am not disclosing the name since, I am still in the middle of the interview process. The interviewer asked me to briefly tell about myself. Before I could say 3 or 4 lines he cut me short and asked what was my role as a student programmer at Ohio Medical Center. Since my resume had C, C++, Java and C# he asked which languages I was most comfortable with and asked me to rate myself on a scale of 1-10.
Then he asked questions on OOPs concepts. He asked quite a lot of them and since I was answering pretty quickly he went on asking them. He asked questions on design patterns and asked about Singleton, Observer, Strategy, Factory, Composite. I did not know what Composite pattern was so could not answer it. Also asked me to elaborate on differences between C++ and Java, parameter passing types, auto-boxing in java. Also asked lot of questions on Collections in Java. Hash table, hashmap, vector, arraylist. I dont remember other questions but we spoke about 15 min on Java/C#.
Then he asked about data structures, stacks, queues. hashing, linked lists. The questions on linked lists were to find the 5th node from the last. This is popular question so I am not answering it here. Other question was to find if there is a loop in the linked list. I answered using Tortoise and Hare problem and we had discussion about why the method works. Again this is popular question, so you can find it on web.
The next question was to find the repeating element in an array where only one element is repeating and all are unique. The question was modified to find the element repeating thrice where are all other elements are unique and one element is repeating twice. I used hashtable approach for both the questions.
Then came the final decider question for which we need to write the code and send. He asked me to design an multi elevator system in a building and send the code in Java by evening. Since I had lot of time, it had to be quite exhaustive. I submitted the code but afterward, I was not happy with the design. May be I should have used a different approach. I used elevatorchallenge.com as reference but I did not copy that.
The interviewer said that I did very well in the interview but I have to see if he would like the elevator system code. Waiting to hear back from them.
Then he asked questions on OOPs concepts. He asked quite a lot of them and since I was answering pretty quickly he went on asking them. He asked questions on design patterns and asked about Singleton, Observer, Strategy, Factory, Composite. I did not know what Composite pattern was so could not answer it. Also asked me to elaborate on differences between C++ and Java, parameter passing types, auto-boxing in java. Also asked lot of questions on Collections in Java. Hash table, hashmap, vector, arraylist. I dont remember other questions but we spoke about 15 min on Java/C#.
Then he asked about data structures, stacks, queues. hashing, linked lists. The questions on linked lists were to find the 5th node from the last. This is popular question so I am not answering it here. Other question was to find if there is a loop in the linked list. I answered using Tortoise and Hare problem and we had discussion about why the method works. Again this is popular question, so you can find it on web.
The next question was to find the repeating element in an array where only one element is repeating and all are unique. The question was modified to find the element repeating thrice where are all other elements are unique and one element is repeating twice. I used hashtable approach for both the questions.
Then came the final decider question for which we need to write the code and send. He asked me to design an multi elevator system in a building and send the code in Java by evening. Since I had lot of time, it had to be quite exhaustive. I submitted the code but afterward, I was not happy with the design. May be I should have used a different approach. I used elevatorchallenge.com as reference but I did not copy that.
The interviewer said that I did very well in the interview but I have to see if he would like the elevator system code. Waiting to hear back from them.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
A letter to Nirpal Dhaliwal
Nirpal Dhaliwal writes in DailyMail that Britain need not apologize to India for ruling it for 300 years. Only a moron can write this kind of article. At one point he even states "without the British, Indians would not even know what it is to be Indian." The worst part is the writer is a Sikh and I have to take great pains to remind him of JalianWala Bagh massacre. During the Bengal famine, millions of Indians died due to the inaction of the British.
I always opined that British Queen deserves same place in history as of Hitler because she was directly or indirectly responsible for millions of deaths in India. And you may discard my opinion as mere rant by some unknown blogger but Nirpal, I would suggest to read this article by Johann Hari.
He also writes:
"should not obscure the fact that British rule in India was a joint effort, impossible without the widespread co- operation of Indians themselves.
Despite the country's vast population, there were never more than 70,000 British troops in India; the running of the country required an enormous infrastructure of native troops, police and bureaucrats."
Dude seriously, I wonder how with your minimal brains, you manage to write for Guardian. Why don't you just leave the history aside and stick to writing tourist guides. The widespread co-operation of Indians was tactically achieved by adopting the policies of Lord Macaulay. A wiki entry on Lord Macaulay shows:
"The term Macaulay's Children is used to refer to people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western culture as a lifestyle, or display attitudes influenced by colonisers[4]. It is used as a pejorative term, and the connotation is one of disloyalty to one's country and one's heritage. This frame of mind or attitude is also referred to as Macaulayism"
Nirpal, doesn't even mention about the partition of India because of which today both Indians and Pakistanis are paying the price and also which took hundreds of thousands of lives. Half the problems the world is facing today is because of the rule of The British. The LTTE problem in Sri Lanka, Israel-Palestine problem, Indo-Pak, Sino-India, and also countless ongoing wars in Africa. The British employed divide and conquer in India because of which Hindu-Muslim relations are always on the boil. They have employed these strategies in Africa as well with disastrous consequences for Africa.
I can go on and on and show how misguided Nirpal's article is but I would suggest him to read atleast Wikipedia articles on British Raj. Atleast then he might figure out that Britain not only needs to apologize for India but to the rest of the world as well.
Links:
http://johannhari.com/2009/07/31/the-dark-side-of-andrew-roberts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay,_1st_Baron_Macaulay#India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famines,_epidemics,_and_public_health_in_the_British_Raj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Economic_impact
ps: This blog has been written in a hurry while I am waiting for the flight. I did not proof read it and if I have given any wrong links or data, will later be corrected.
I always opined that British Queen deserves same place in history as of Hitler because she was directly or indirectly responsible for millions of deaths in India. And you may discard my opinion as mere rant by some unknown blogger but Nirpal, I would suggest to read this article by Johann Hari.
He also writes:
"should not obscure the fact that British rule in India was a joint effort, impossible without the widespread co- operation of Indians themselves.
Despite the country's vast population, there were never more than 70,000 British troops in India; the running of the country required an enormous infrastructure of native troops, police and bureaucrats."
Dude seriously, I wonder how with your minimal brains, you manage to write for Guardian. Why don't you just leave the history aside and stick to writing tourist guides. The widespread co-operation of Indians was tactically achieved by adopting the policies of Lord Macaulay. A wiki entry on Lord Macaulay shows:
"The term Macaulay's Children is used to refer to people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western culture as a lifestyle, or display attitudes influenced by colonisers[4]. It is used as a pejorative term, and the connotation is one of disloyalty to one's country and one's heritage. This frame of mind or attitude is also referred to as Macaulayism"
Nirpal, doesn't even mention about the partition of India because of which today both Indians and Pakistanis are paying the price and also which took hundreds of thousands of lives. Half the problems the world is facing today is because of the rule of The British. The LTTE problem in Sri Lanka, Israel-Palestine problem, Indo-Pak, Sino-India, and also countless ongoing wars in Africa. The British employed divide and conquer in India because of which Hindu-Muslim relations are always on the boil. They have employed these strategies in Africa as well with disastrous consequences for Africa.
I can go on and on and show how misguided Nirpal's article is but I would suggest him to read atleast Wikipedia articles on British Raj. Atleast then he might figure out that Britain not only needs to apologize for India but to the rest of the world as well.
Links:
http://johannhari.com/2009/07/31/the-dark-side-of-andrew-roberts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay,_1st_Baron_Macaulay#India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famines,_epidemics,_and_public_health_in_the_British_Raj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Economic_impact
ps: This blog has been written in a hurry while I am waiting for the flight. I did not proof read it and if I have given any wrong links or data, will later be corrected.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Rosetta Java developer interview
I had interview for Technology Associate with Rosetta, a Cleveland based interactive brand marketing company. The position was for Java developer and I had three rounds of interviews. The first round was with the Team Manager and it was mostly HR based with few technical questions sprinkled mainly about the projects in my resume.
The second round was technical and all the questions were on Java. He gave me code on synchronization and asked me to find if anything is wrong with the code. There was another coding based question on Java Reflections. I never used reflections and I just before the interview coincidentally I read about reflection. I just glanced through the concept since I had lot of other things to go through. I think I did well on that question. And then he gave me a recursion based problem and asked to code it iteratively.
Finally he asked all the OOPs concepts final, finally, finalize, static, abstract, inheritance, interfaces, garbage collection, collections(hashmap, sets). I concentrated a lot on generics and luckily they are still using JDK 1.4 so I did not get any questions on newly added Java concepts.
Overall the interview was positive experience except for the greyhound bus ride from Columbus to Cleveland. This is the second time it happened to me that my co-passenger was drunk although this guy was much better than the other co-passenger I had from Columbus to Chicago. Why would Greyhound let in the passengers who are drunk onto its buses is beyond my comprehension
The second round was technical and all the questions were on Java. He gave me code on synchronization and asked me to find if anything is wrong with the code. There was another coding based question on Java Reflections. I never used reflections and I just before the interview coincidentally I read about reflection. I just glanced through the concept since I had lot of other things to go through. I think I did well on that question. And then he gave me a recursion based problem and asked to code it iteratively.
Finally he asked all the OOPs concepts final, finally, finalize, static, abstract, inheritance, interfaces, garbage collection, collections(hashmap, sets). I concentrated a lot on generics and luckily they are still using JDK 1.4 so I did not get any questions on newly added Java concepts.
Overall the interview was positive experience except for the greyhound bus ride from Columbus to Cleveland. This is the second time it happened to me that my co-passenger was drunk although this guy was much better than the other co-passenger I had from Columbus to Chicago. Why would Greyhound let in the passengers who are drunk onto its buses is beyond my comprehension
Thursday, July 1, 2010
.NET interview
Today I had an interview for an internship position at a reputed company in Columbus, OH. They were looking for .NET developers and since I had lots of experience in Microsoft technologies, I got a call from them.
I was pretty confident that I would do well in interview since I am quite comfortable with .NET. I was asked questions like ASP.NET page lifecycle, viewstate, Session variables, LINQ, dynamic web controls and pretty much standard stuff.
I had another interview with another Columbus based company and it was on phone. They sent me few pieces code and I don't think I can post that code here. They told me that code is from their software. So not taking risk. I was asked to go through the code and explain what is happening with the code. They sent an aspx page, a code behind file and another cs file. Questions were on LINQ, javascript, to explain CommandName and CommandArgument...
There are few things I could not answer, like one question on Javascript. He asked me about variable naming conventions in js file and asked why variables are named like that. I did not have any concrete answer apart from saying that its following standard procedures on how to name variables. I don't know what he was expecting though.
I was pretty confident that I would do well in interview since I am quite comfortable with .NET. I was asked questions like ASP.NET page lifecycle, viewstate, Session variables, LINQ, dynamic web controls and pretty much standard stuff.
I had another interview with another Columbus based company and it was on phone. They sent me few pieces code and I don't think I can post that code here. They told me that code is from their software. So not taking risk. I was asked to go through the code and explain what is happening with the code. They sent an aspx page, a code behind file and another cs file. Questions were on LINQ, javascript, to explain CommandName and CommandArgument...
There are few things I could not answer, like one question on Javascript. He asked me about variable naming conventions in js file and asked why variables are named like that. I did not have any concrete answer apart from saying that its following standard procedures on how to name variables. I don't know what he was expecting though.
Monday, June 28, 2010
My Own Private India
Joel Stein writes in an article for Time about how Edison, NJ has become home to one of the largest Indian communities. My only question to Mr. Joel
"You sure are aware that right now American troops are in Afghanistan, Iraq right? If you are so pissed off having Indians in Edison, NJ just imagine how Iraqis and Afghanis are right now feeling? "
Seriously TIME, don't you even think twice before publishing an article. I mean did you even read the article? Is that the journalistic levels you had to stoop to. I will have to say here that I am not a regular reader of TIME magazine. Occasionally when CNN links to TIME, I do read some articles or if any of my friends forward a link from TIME. From few articles I read in TIME magazine, it seems to suffer from Indophobia. For instance search for this article - An Indian Muslim in Crisis by Aryn Baker. (This article appeared in Time during Mumbai Terror attacks). And I never heard of Mr. Joel Stein before this. So my views on Joel Stein are strictly related to this article alone. Well after reading this article I don't think I will be reading Joel's articles anymore.
Update: I was reading other blogs like Sepia Mutiny(mostly written like a rant rather than response ) and few other comments. Do read them. 8asians.com asks a very good question : What if in the article, Indians were replaced by Latinos and what if the Joel Stein had written "Now we know why Mexico is so damn poor".
Another interesting thing I found out was "White Flight". Do read about it in wikipedia.
Read the opinion piece in The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article495461.ece?homepage=true
"You sure are aware that right now American troops are in Afghanistan, Iraq right? If you are so pissed off having Indians in Edison, NJ just imagine how Iraqis and Afghanis are right now feeling? "
Seriously TIME, don't you even think twice before publishing an article. I mean did you even read the article? Is that the journalistic levels you had to stoop to. I will have to say here that I am not a regular reader of TIME magazine. Occasionally when CNN links to TIME, I do read some articles or if any of my friends forward a link from TIME. From few articles I read in TIME magazine, it seems to suffer from Indophobia. For instance search for this article - An Indian Muslim in Crisis by Aryn Baker. (This article appeared in Time during Mumbai Terror attacks). And I never heard of Mr. Joel Stein before this. So my views on Joel Stein are strictly related to this article alone. Well after reading this article I don't think I will be reading Joel's articles anymore.
Update: I was reading other blogs like Sepia Mutiny(mostly written like a rant rather than response ) and few other comments. Do read them. 8asians.com asks a very good question : What if in the article, Indians were replaced by Latinos and what if the Joel Stein had written "Now we know why Mexico is so damn poor".
Another interesting thing I found out was "White Flight". Do read about it in wikipedia.
Read the opinion piece in The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article495461.ece?homepage=true
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