Round 1
Questions: Specific question not provided.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 2
Questions: Design a Poll API with the following methods:
- Create poll
- Delete poll
- Update poll
- Vote on a poll
- Print the final results of the poll
The poll object is expected to contain a list of questions. In the update poll method, the user can update a question for a certain poll ID.
Candidate's Approach
Implemented all methods except for the bonus of implementing multi-threading. The interviewer was friendly, and I managed to provide hints through the conversation.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 3
Questions:
- Some average competitive programming question involving an array and a divide operation (always divide by 2^i) to reach the minimum sum.
- Minimum Number of Taps to Open to Water a Garden (LeetCode, hard)
- Theoretical questions on heap implementation, heap sort, and heapify. Discussion on removing an element in log(n) time from a heap and comparison with BST.
Candidate's Approach
Used brute force and a priority queue for the first question. Discussed the theoretical aspects of heaps and their comparison with BSTs during the interview.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer was very good.
Round 4
Questions:
- Basic HR questions and project discussion at the current company.
- Design problems:
- Implement a system to manage limited inventory, preventing users from checking out if stock is too low.
- Design a game player allotment system where players are assigned random opponents with similar ratings.
Candidate's Approach
Discussed row locking and concurrency methods for the inventory problem, relating it to serializability from DBMS. Suggested hashing buckets for the player allotment problem. The interviewer seemed satisfied but did not provide hints.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer appeared satisfied but did not provide any hints during the interview.
Overall Verdict: No hire
What I learned: Start preparing for design problems; they are mainly focusing on DSA, LLD, and HLD.
Comments:
- I applied through a referral, and the position became available about 3-4 months ago.
- The system design interview was entirely theoretical.
- I didn’t receive any feedback; I was informed by a friend who referred me that I performed strongly in the DSA round.
- During the DSA interview, they expected complete and runnable code, and I was able to solve all the problems presented.
- I graduated from a tier 1 college and had 5 months of full-time experience and 2 months of internship experience (total 7 months).
- In the online assessment, I successfully solved all questions.
PS: This dude asked me an SDE 3 round problem.
Currently, I am working with another company, Remote & hike was 75%.