The phone interview lasted one hour. The interviewer was a very friendly MIT girl (ABC). She had worked at her original startup for almost a year after it was acquired by the Grammys. The interview consisted of two simple questions: a parasitic vulture problem and an original calculation problem (described below). I solved the first problem very quickly. My code used a Map> for searching. After quickly finishing the code, the follow-up question asked me to optimize the search. So I transformed the problem into a binary search to find the first element in a sorted list that is less than or equal to a certain value. However, because the boundary conditions weren't handled well, it wasn't bug-free. The interviewer felt that was sufficient and moved on to the next problem. The second problem simulated a stack. Besides the common pop and push functions, it also had an increase(val, num) function, requiring the bottom num elements of the stack to be incremented by val. I initially tried a brute-force solution, but stopped due to time constraints. I verbally described a method similar to binary search, maintaining a list containing pairs representing the first N elements that need to be incremented by M. The interviewer thought it was about right and ended the interview there. Originally, I felt I hadn't performed well, but there were no bugs or mistakes, so I was thinking of moving on. However, after the interview last Wednesday, I received an invitation for the on-line competition today, Monday. Thanks to the interviewer!