I woke up around 7:00 am after a relatively quiet and restful sleep, although I found it hard to sleep at first because there was a light on in my room and I didn't find out where it was or how to turn it off until after I woke up. :P
I changed and went down to the hotel kitchen for a buffet breakfast that featured cereal with cold milk, fried bacon and other things that I wouldn't normally have for breakfast. After all, it was free (or rather, I didn't have to pay for it myself). :P
After that, since there was some time and I didn't feel like cooping myself up in the room the whole morning reading books, I decided to take a walk and see a bit more of Hong Kong than just Kimberley Road. Before that, I first took some pictures of the skyline from my window.
( Photography and sight-seeing )After that, I spent some time reading some of the textbooks I'd packed in my suitcase and preparing for the interview. I even had time to take a silly picture of myself. :P
Looking silly hereI ate a quick lunch and dashed down to the hotel where the interviews were to take place. I think it's credit to my walking speed and sense of direction that I got there without getting late or being lost. ^_^;; The interviews were each about 45 minutes to an hour long, and I had 5 of them, with some breaks in between for refreshments and restroom breaks.
To answer
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testing4l's
comment, trees were not mentioned at all during any of the interviews. :P Most of the time, the constraints on the problems were set at O(n) in terms of space or time, and since adding n nodes to a tree is O(n log
2 n) in the worst case, they weren't really suitable data structures. That also means the reading and refreshers I did about 2-3 trees, 2-3-4 trees, red-black trees and AVL trees was largely irrelevant. It was still good to have read about them though, so that at least I could show I knew what I was talking about. By and large, most of the problems posed related to arrays and pointers in C, and I found myself using hashtables frequently to tackle the problems.
The first two interviews were probably not my best, since I was still warming up and getting used to the environment, and these were more focused on hard-core low-level programming (for example, implementing a string-reversal function without using the C runtime). My third interview was a non-technical interview with my HR recruiter, and it was a welcome break from the coding. I believe this interview set the tone for the final two interviews, both of which took place and involved more high-level code writing, including a pseudo-code function for the last interview.
I finished around 7 pm together with another candidate, and both of us decided to walk to the harbour to take a look at the night skyline of Hong Kong before we left. The first picture didn't come out very well (perhaps because the camera's exposure was set wrongly or because it was just mis-behaving), but it was a picture of the lights across the harbour.
Coloured streaks of light~The second picture was one the other interview candidate took of me. I probably looked really tired in this one, but after 5 hours of interviews, what else would you expect? :P
Tired nyanko~The results of the interview will be made known to me via e-mail on the 4th of November (a Saturday). I hope, and I'm quietly confident, that I'll get an offer. In case I don't, though, I'm going to work locally for some time during my one-year waiting period and then apply again.
The night ended pretty uneventfully. I went back to the hotel for dinner, and after that fell asleep like a log. :P
There isn't as much to write about the third day, so that post will (rest assured) be a lot shorter than this one.
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