National Instruments
I’ve been doing this school thing for almost 16 years but it seems that I still can’t keep myself from leaving all my homework until Sunday night. I did have one hell of a weekend thought, if that’s any excuse (case races on both Friday and Saturday night).
National Instruments really knows how to interview a person. I showed up on Friday at 8AM and it was nonstop until 5PM. The day consisted of 2 hour and a half interviews and 1 two hour interview, along with some presentations and a nice lunch. My first interview was with the Systems Software group. They’re responsible for creating all of the architecture-specific drivers that sit right above of the hardware and provide a nice abstraction for the higher-level software. The interviewers were two young down to earth guys. I knew I was in good shape when the first thing we talked about was the Texas/West Virginia that had occurred the night before. They asked me a couple behavioral questions and a few technical questions, all of which I think I answered pretty well.
The second interview was with a member of the LabVIEW team. This one didn’t go so well. Unlike the first interview which took place in a typical closed conference room, this guy just sat me down in a chair in front of a whiteboard located right in the middle of the work floor. All of the floors at NI are basically wide open, so there were people not 10 feet from me working at their desks. A little more troublesome was that he didn’t have papers to fill out or anything. This gave me the impression that he either had a photographic memory, or that by the end of the interview he would have his mind made up. We talked about a few of my past projects, and then it was technical question time. He asked me to write a function that given the root of a colored binary tree, would compute the number of groups in the tree where a group was defined as 3 or more adjacent nodes of the same color. I got up in front of the whiteboard, then stood there for a while thinking, then stood there for a little longer, and then just kept standing there. Maybe it was the fact that this interview was right after lunch, or that there were people all around me working on their computers and talking to co-workers, but I just couldn’t get the wheels turning in my head. I started brainstorming on the white board and talking out-loud through possible solutions (they do say that it’s not necessarily the answer you give but rather how you get there). To my dismay though, this guy wouldn’t provide any feedback at all. Maybe he enjoyed watching me struggle, but it was really frustrating standing there feeling like I wasn’t making any progress and him just watching silently. After what seemed like an eternity, I had a solution on the board that seemed like it might work. He asked a few more questions and then the interview was over. Whatever, I didn’t want to work for the LabVIEW team anyways!
The third interview was with the Device I/O team and was the best of the three. He asked me some questions about virtual memory and threading, stuff that was fresh in my mind from my operating systems course. We burned through those questions pretty quick and had a lot of time left in the interview, so he thought it’d be interesting to give me a real problem that he had been working on at NI. He was stuck on one part and thought maybe I could look at it from a different angle and provide some help. To both our surprises, I was actually able to do so. We spent the last 20 or so minutes fleshing out my idea and had something workable by the time the interview was over. These last 20 minutes may have had more impact on my interview than anything else. They said I sure hear back pretty quickly, so we’ll see.
