To begin with by the time I went for the 1:1 face to face interview I already had offers from Cisco and Juniper, however since I had committed to the interview I decided to go ahead for the experience.
20 minutes into the first round I realized that while to me it appeared that I was providing various alternatives to solving a problem the interviewer had a very specific solution in mind and all the encouragement was with the intent to nudge me to find the "right" solution.
I have a taken lot of interviews and its perfectly fine to proceed in this manner as long as the intent is to gauge how a person thinks but as it turns out all that mattered was the final solution. This happened repeatedly for different problems.
It got really funny when one of the interviewers wrote code with the standard problem of a C function returning a pointer to a local variable and printing it out in the caller. After pointing out what was wrong the question was whether the code would even compile to which I clearly replied that not only will it compile but also run. The interviewer refused to agree despite explaining why the compiler would consider it valid code and I don't think it was a way to get me to doubt myself, the interviewer really believed it :-D
It was very simple to get the interviewers to loose their cool by simply sticking to a proposed solution and defending it and having them insist it was not an optimized solution. Even better was to get them to explain their version of the "right" solution and then poking holes in it.
On the whole I had the feeling that the interviewers were more concerned about getting affirmations rather than finding out about the candidate's skills. So I know I will definitely not be a good fit in the company.
