Technical Screen

A Rushed 30-Minute Screen on Sorting, Probability, and a Cache Race Condition

MercorSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026

The interviewer was a principal from Caltech. He talked fast and used a lot of technical jargon, like a college professor would. It was rushed, only 30 minutes. Explain a sorting algorithm better than O(N^2). Merge sort — recursively split the array into left and right halves until there are only 2 elements left, then merge by inserting the smaller of the two into a new array and returning it (N…

Shared by a candidate · reported Sep 2026. Interview formats change; use it as a guide, not a script.