Probably the most twisted interview I ever had. I applied online, did several interviews with different teams. Few interviewers were friendly and technically qualified (I guess), others quite serious, the amount of seriousness you can’t distinguish easily from arrogance .
You don’t get interviewed by managers only, also by future colleagues. So depending on the position or jump-to-others (read below) expect a web programmer asking you (somebody who spent last 10 years writing drivers at Intel perhaps?) what a virtual function is.
First of all, if you're not Chinese or Indian living in Singapore, there is a probability you won't understand their English properly. As a programmer, if you hear “[something you don’t understand]…virtual…[same here]….virtual function?" you realize they asked what a virtual function is or how it works, but not the entire sentence.
The interview process is somehow chaotic, different people from HR contact you. You talk with one, you receive an email from another one. You start the interview for the position you applied for, let's say C++. If they think you don't fit the position, nobody writes for weeks. Then you receive another email about a new position asking if you would like to continue, and then again and again (this is the above mentioned jump-to-others). Probably they try to find a candidate who can fill one of the position they have, C++, JavaScript, cloud technologies etc. going through interviews with different teams answering the same questions (e.g. virtual function) over and over again. It seems Singapore office take care about a lot of software products.
If they have your CV saying for example Qt is not in your main skills, why interviewing you for such position to tell you “oh we were looking for Qt”? This answer, you get if/when you ask during other position interview, because they don’t send you rejection. At the end of Nth interview, they told me they would let me know in any case positive or rejection. You can at this point figure out if they ever answered.
There is something wrong with Autodesk offices in Asia I guess, if you check their open position you note there are 70 Software Engineering available position in Singapore+Shanghai, this should already sounds a bell in your mind. If you take few IT giants and put their open position together, you get a smaller number. Apparently, by reading other interview-reviews telling they continuously re-organize, fire, hire etc. there must be something true. Most of the questions were not technical, which confirm again other reviews and what I just said. They asked what you do if new schedule is 1 week and not 3 as decided before, or what you do if you have to take over a project from a team that was just fired (moving to other products and using different languages? Why not firing N-1 people and let the most experienced one in that team stay and keep supporting that software?)
Few questions asked by managers were:
1) Will the following compile? "Class something;" ..and the answer is no because "Class” must be lowercase. Obviously there was more code around that and, after I spotted other syntax errors, I awkwardly had to tell them "Class" and "Using" must be lowercase. So if they keep silence, don’t be shy go ahead and tell them it won’t compile unless you remove the quotation marks.
2) What's the value of i after this:
i++ + ++i + i++ + ++i
print("..", i++ + ++i)
i++ + i++ + ++i
print("..", i++ + ++i)
I'm not kidding, do they know that this is compiler-dependent and make no sense analyze that? In any case, solving/not this means you’re smart/not or testing your problem solving skills? Not all questions were like these but there were many bizarre ones, some of which I’ve never seen/heard. Obviously easy questions are better than explaining how a spin lock works or how a multi-master bus arbitration works, but after some bizarre questions they rise in me the curiosity to ask them some technical questions.
So, if you're from USA or somewhere else, the outcome here doesn't look very promising. This is not meant to be sarcastic review, but honestly I wonder what’s happening, it’s not a few people company made by high school students and, all these reviews here put some more bad reputation about this office. I think global managers should check properly what's happening in branch offices, as long as the company works and they make money they don't care perhaps? Good luck.