Steve Yegge tells “The Truth About Interviewing“.
If you want a job at a company like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple, or Amazon.com, they’re going to have high standards. It doesn’t matter if you “know how to program”. They’re going to test you on algorithmic complexity analysis, advanced data structures, algorithm design, searching and sorting, internationalization techniques, network protocols, OS-level memory management, parsing and semantic analysis, recursion and mathematical induction, graph theory, combinatorics, programming language theory, machine architecture, discrete math and logic, graphics and window systems, fonts and typesetting, color spaces and representations, databases and query languages, filesystems and storage, embedded systems, device drivers, mobile and wireless protocols, and internet standards and technologies.
If you’re lucky, that is.
If you’re unlucky, they’ll ask you to derive the outline of their Ph.D. thesis on fault-tolerant massively parallel machine-learning systems. Or to solve a grand-unification style computation problem involving telephone switches, grid networks, and third-degree differential equations. Or, God forbid, they’ll ask you about the darkest corners of C syntax.