Phone Screen
Questions:
- LP: 2 questions - mainly around ambiguity / when you didn’t meet a deadline.
- Coding: Product except self
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 1: Problem Solving
Questions:
- LP1: Deliver Results
- LP2: Learn and be Curious
- Coding: Design a system where users connect to Wi-Fi and combine songs in their playlist to play according to the most famous song.
Candidate's Approach
- Understood the problem as a map-reduce + top K combo.
- Specified a scenario for removing a song if a user leaves the party.
- Implemented code for functions like getting the top song and adding a song using PriorityQueue.
- Collaborated with the interviewer to fix syntax bugs and improve the solution.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer appreciated the candidate's thinking and involvement in the coding process.
Round 2: System Design
Questions:
- LP1: Earn Trust
- LP2: Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit
- Coding: Design a recommendation engine for an autocomplete system.
Candidate's Approach
- Started with functional and non-functional requirements.
- Proposed using a Trie structure on every machine and splitting requests based on the starting letter of the word.
- Discussed in-memory caching for efficiency.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer was impressed and engaged in the conversation, forgetting to cover LPs due to interest in the technical discussion.
Round 3: Logical and Maintainability Code
Questions:
- LP1: Customer Obsession
- LP2: Ownership
Note: This round was rescheduled due to the interviewer not showing up.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 4: Data Structures and Algorithms
Questions:
- LP1: Invent and Simplify
- LP2: Dive Deep
- Coding: Can Jump
Candidate's Approach
- Solved the problem using backtracking.
- Fixed a bug pointed out by the interviewer regarding a test case.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer was impressed with the candidate's solution after fixing the bug.
Round 5: Rescheduled Round
Questions:
- LP: "Frustrated customer, what did you do?"
- Coding: All Nodes Distance K in Binary Tree
Candidate's Approach
- Initially panicked due to unfamiliarity with the question.
- Suggested using recursion to find nodes at K distance but struggled with implementation.
- Did not complete the code.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer did not provide much guidance and expressed dissatisfaction with the candidate's approach.
Final Thoughts: The candidate received an email stating they were not proceeding with the application and advised not to apply for SDE roles for a year. Despite positive feedback mentioned, specific areas for improvement were not provided. The candidate felt disappointed after investing significant time in preparation.