Junior platform team SW engineer
Got onsite interview directly by employee referral. I was invited for onsite after 2 months. Interviewed with 4 people.
First: In a binary tree, prune leaves that are odd and have no even children, recursively.
Second: Deep Java and OO questions, inheritance, polymorphism, overloading, lots of question about collection framework, how they are implemented behind the scene and when to use which, downcasting and upcasting, complicated exceptions questions
Third (with the team lead): very random and irrelevant questions, TCP handshaking, DNS server, how Internet works end to end, variables alignment in memory, how cpu is connected to memory! how tomcat works and its thread pools, the interviewer was inconsistent and started and ended with a very negative impression, no question about Java or distributed systems
Forth: with the manager, he described Yahoo’s scaling up open problems and asked me how I would solve them, questions regarding scaling up redis, kafka, mesos, memcashed,…, I believe questions were appropriate for a senior positions
My suggestion is that if you are not from India, do not waste your time interviewing at yahoo platform team