I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at 2K (Novato, CA) in May 2012
Interview
I heard about the job through my college's career center and received a short test the next day to complete over the weekend. It basically consisted of using Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest path. The company then contacted me to set up travel arrangements to do an in-person interview within the next few days (all expenses were paid for by 2K).
The interview itself was fairly straightforward. After a brief chat with my would-be boss, I got about 3 hours to complete four problems (on a computer, no whiteboard, just a text editor). Lunch was provided during this time. Afterwards, two of the engineers and I went over my solutions. The interviewers provided hints for a few of the questions. A few of the questions were a little tricky to handle and may easily stump new grads, especially if they aren't comfortable with C and C++ memory management.
The environment was pretty nice, in my opinion. There were actual rooms, instead of the "one big room, no doors" environment seen in the Bay Area. All of the interviewers were very friendly and I never felt like I was being rushed or looked down upon.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
You have to design an interface for clients to add, remove, and iterate over bunnies in a pet store cage. Children are removing them nonstop and the number of bunnies is constantly increasing (up to a predefined max). The only problem is that while you have enough memory, the CPU in the target machine is really slow, so performance is key. (No STL, C or C++)
a. For the next part of the question, assume that all of a sudden, new and delete (and malloc/free/realloc/etc.) are broken and crash the machine when used. Fix your code to handle this problem.
b. The designers want to be able to feed the bunnies. 1 bag of food feeds 7 bunnies. Only thing is, multiplication, division, and modulus are broken and totally unusable.
A new processor has been designed that’s very fast but has only 1 register and 2 memory slots. It has two instructions SUB(tract) and STO(re). Implement LOD(load), ADD, and MOV using only the following:
a. SUB a, memory1
b. SUB a, memory2
c. STO memory1, a
d. STO memory2, a
You’re given a “sorter,” basically a box with two inputs and two outputs. If I1 <= I2, O1 is I1 and O2 is I2. If I1 > I2, O1 is I2 and O2 is I1. Using the minimum number of sorters, create a diagram of a four element sorter (I1, I2, I3, I4 with O1 <= O2 <= O3 <= O4).
Long take-home assignment used to evaluate technical skills and creativity. Involved multiple parts and was fairly open-ended. Following assignment, there was a short personal interview and no feedback on the assignment.
I applied online. I interviewed at 2K (Novato, CA)
Interview
Hackerrank assessment with couple of multiple choices questions on C++ fundamentals and coding question. Then there is a take home exam that is in a small coding project style. 2 rounds of behavioral interviews after.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at 2K (Dublin, Dublin)
Interview
Reponses to queries were careless. The HR did not answer the question at all. No Feedback was provided after the online test for months. I sent them an email to notify them to remove me from the candidate list after accepting another offer from a different company and a discouraging feedback was provided only then.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions about vectors, oop, and data structures and algorithms.
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at 2K with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 60% positive. To compare, the company-average is 41.7% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 19 days to get hired, when considering 10 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at 2K overall takes an average of 21 days.
Common stages of the interview process at 2K as a Software Engineer according to 10 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 36%
Skills test: 14%
Group panel interview: 14%
Presentation: 14%
One on one interview: 14%
Background check: 7%
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