The process took 3 days. I interviewed at MetaCarta (Cambridge, MA) in Sept 2007
Interview
The interview process was brutal. The company has strong ties to MIT with many of its senior engineers having graduated from MIT (or comparable). The interview process is far more technically oriented than other companies that pride themselves with outlandish interview processes (such as Google), with fewer pointless questions (like how many Starbucks are in the United States). The top concern is quality software engineering skills.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Given a linked list element definition and function header, write (on the whiteboard) a linked list removal function in C. The list may have duplicates and is not sorted.
What would cause a network spinner run at 100 round trips per second before being "fixed" to run at 10,000 round trips per second? (Average query of 2k = 3.2mb/sec, network capacity = 10mbit, delay between writes = 5ms, delay for server-side computation = 0.001ms.)