I was contacted by a Recruiter for a Senior Engineering Position at MSCI. The phone interview went well, i was questioned on threading, difference between using synchronized keyword an d Reentrant locks in java.
Once the phone interview was done, i was called for an on-site interview at MSCI Berkeley office (this office was an acquisition from BARRA systems). Five engineers interview me, apart from asking questions about my previous projects they asked mostly Java related questions.
1) What search algorithm runs in log (n) time.
Ans) Binary Search.
2) What is a race condition and how would you avoid it.
3) Is one painter paints a room in one hour and the other painter in 30 mins. How long woud it take for both the painters to paint the room.
4) What is ThreadLocal ?
5) What Final and abstract class in java ?
And some basic java programming questions.
I did well on the interview except one where i knew the answer but i completely blanked out. So, my suggestion will be to keep your confidence level high. A few interviewees were not very responsive and it seemed they are just robots asking you questions.
I didn't hear anything for about three weeks. I contacted the recruiter to check the status, again after a week she told me that they are looking for someone with more years of experience. I than got an email again after a week that they want to re-consider me and would like to talk on the phone one more time with Head of Application Development.
The phone interview again went fine, and they told me that my resume is impressive and that that are looking for someone energetic. I was asked again about my previous job experience, and a question related to Garbage Collector wen doing performance testing in my previous job. A week from that i got an email from recruiter that they again are looking for someone with more experience.
Not really a good experience overall, communications is slow. It take them forever to decide, and they go back and forth on their decisions.