I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at KAYAK in Feb 2015
Interview
Phone screen with some behavioral questions, followed by a coding exercise. The day after submitting, got a call to schedule two technical interviews and an interview with the team's manager with more behavioral questions. The technical interviews turned out to be quite basic. All interviews were over phone or skype; no on-site interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How method parameter passing works in Java (pass by value, reference semantics). Questions about elementary algorithms and data structures.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at KAYAK (Cambridge, MA) in Mar 2016
Interview
Sent resume through recruiter and received programming test. I didn't take the programming test because after my long career, they are below me. The market is hot right now for java developers that I do not need to jump through hoops. Besides, they can reject code for any reason ... if they don't want to tell me what is wrong with the code, then I am not interested.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Exercise #1:
A robot lands on Mars, which happens to be a cartesian grid; assuming that we hand the robot these instructions, such as LFFFRFFFRRFFF, where "L" is a "turn 90 degrees left", "R" is a "turn 90 degrees right", and "F" is "go forward one space, please write control code for the robot such that it ends up at the appropriate-and-correct destination, and include unit tests.
Here is an example output with command "FF":
[0, 2]
Exercise #2:
Part 1:
Write a program that counts in sequential order when given a start and end value - without using any iterative programing loops, i.e. while, for, do, for-each, etc. You can assume that both the start and end values will always be positive and that the start value will always be less then the end value. There should only be one method with the following signature:
void countUp(int start, int end) {
// All code exercise code should go here
}
Here is example output with start=0 and end=5:
0
1
2
3
4
5
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at KAYAK (Cambridge, MA) in Oct 2015
Interview
Met a KAYAK rep at a University job fair. They liked my CV and I got a call the next day to set up an interview in Cambridge. I went into the office and met several people on the UI team. The office itself is spectacular and everyone I met was smart and articulate. We spoke about my past experiences with web development, and they asked what I was passionate about. I answered a few simple coding questions and one hard one.
Apparently the whole office heads to the onsite bar at 4:30 on Thursdays, so I finished the interview by having a couple beers with the CTO and the head of engineering.
Three days later I received an offer letter and accepted.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
How would you implement the bind function in javascript?