Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories Software Engineer interview questions

I applied to SEL after finding a posting on monster.com. Within a day or two I received email requesting me to schedule a phone interview with their HR rep. They also sent some attachments describing the corporate culture (to which they attach quite a lot of importance, so study the material before interviewing!) The interview took about an hour to do. The first half consisted of some questions about why I wanted to work for SEL -- surprisingly, none of the tricky behavioral stuff such as "What personality disorder makes you most difficult to work with?" Then there were five or six basic questions about the C and C++ languages: what is a union and when do you use it? what can you tell me about semaphores and mutexes? Then they emailed a programming problem involving string manipulation --- write a function to search for a target substring and replace it. There was a half-hour time limit to get the function written and emailed back. I didn't think far enough ahead to have an IDE up and running, so I just answered in the body of the email without testing -- just making it in under the deadline. (I immediately tested it after submitting and I had a couple of typos, so that the code wouldn't compile. On fixing those, it worked ok, but submitting untested and uncompilable code may very well have been the reason I bombed out.) I heard back within a day or two that they would look elsewhere, without providing a particular reason. I hadn't thought the interview to have gone that badly, aside from my fizzled coding. It may be that I just didn't have any experience in their product line that tipped the balance against me, or it may be that most applicants can complete the problem and test it in the allotted half hour. Even though I didn't get the job, I thought that the interviewing procedure was fair and well-managed.

Phone interview, full day interview on site, multiple rounds with different teams. Written coding problems.