09 Mar 2018
This post is a copy from my old website and blog. I have kept its original post date.
This happened about a month ago, two days after the Valentine’s day post. I didn’t really get a chance to make a post on reflect on it, but I’ve got some time now.
So a while back I made a post about how I had another interview with NVIDIA with the Director of Linux Software. Turns out it was a behavioral interview with the director acting as the hiring manager. He told me about the team and what products they were involved with (hint hint: it’s related to Linux). Anyway, it was pretty uneventful, and I soon scheduled my 2nd interview.
The 2nd interview was a technical one with one of the engineers. The first question was about what the keyword “volatile” meant in C. Easy enough: it marks a variable as one that can be modified independently of the thread of execution, so it is to not be cached in a register and must be loaded from memory every time.
The next question was describe a deadlock and how to prevent one. I had more of an issue with this: I never really did any concurrent work, but I was able to describe a deadlock. Describing the prevention of a deadlock was harder: I settled on making sure that the order of resource locking and unlocking happened in a consistent manner, which was an answer the interviewer seemed content with.
My third and last question was a programming question: find a decimal palindrome passed in as a uint32_t.
I made a joke about the cop out solution being to use sscanf() to build a string version and do a
string palindrome check.
More seriously, I noted that it being a uint32_t I already knew the max number of digits possible
(10 for 4 billion-ish), so you could allocate a 10 byte buffer on the stack to hold digits,
use another variable to keep track of the number of digits, and perform a modulo-divide to extract each digit.
From that point on, with the knowledge of how many digits there were you could check for the palindrome using
index 0 and the number of digits – 1 and working inwards (ironically, pretty much the same way as doing
it as with a string).
The interviewer was satisfied with the solution, and then asked me what the time complexity is,
in terms of N being the number. I worked through it aloud: it requires 2 traversals of all the digits,
and the number of digits is log10(N), so the time complexity would be O(log10(N)).
They were happy with the answer.
After this, the interviewer asked me about the projects on my resume. I told them about the “Power Glove” project my friend Ryan and I did in EE 445L last year, and told them the journey of debugging the host side driver. Next they asked me about the LCCC (Little Computer Compiler Collection) project that I was working on. I told them about the pitiful state of the tools for LC-3 and that I was currently working on designing a binary format based on ELF to replace the primitive old one, and that I was currently digesting the ELF specification to see what would be needed or not in the format (such as PLTs). The interviewer was pretty helpful: they suggested a document by Ulrich Drepper about dynamic shared objects.
After this, the interviewer asked if I had any questions for them. I asked them about the structure of the Linux driver team, and how much theyinteracted with X11, OpenGL, and Vulkan: they said that this team would focus more on the driver itself, but the engineers did dabble in those above technologies.
This is a team that I actually am really interest in working with. Currently (2018-03-09), I haven’t heard anything back from the recruiters. This seems like a long time, but at least I haven’t gotten bad news!