I interviewed at Uber before they launched. Their "take home" was to create... Uber.
Here's the exact challenge:
UberCab Coder Challenge
1) Write a program that determines the wait time, trip time, rating, and fare for a black car trip in San Francisco, given that the customer's pickup location and destination is randomly placed anywhere in San Francisco proper, and given that there are X number of cars all placed randomly across the city. Use GoogleMaps API for trip duration time. Run simulation 100 times for 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cars. Output average wait times and trip times for each # of cars the simulation was run on.
2) Take #1 and do the same pickup and trip time calculation given that there are Y customer requests per hour (extra credit if this is done with a Poisson distribution ;)). Take into account each car's availability (given that they may have been selected to carry a customer and are in transit on pickup or on actual trip, and thus unavailable). Run simulation given the number of cars in #1, but for each simulation in #1, run once for Y=1x, 2x, 5x, the number of requests per hour (X being the number of cars in the city, as defined in #1)
3) Take #2 and then make a GoogleMaps mashup that then shows the various trips that were taken for each simulation. Provide mashup interface showing all trips but also provide ability to only show trips for each driver.
4) Write a "Hello World" app on the iPhone that for a certain driver logging in shows all of his trips taken in the last simulation, the average rating that he got, and the total fares he collected during those trips.