Round 1 (Machine coding round)
Questions: Need to design and implement an in-memory search engine for a collection of text documents. The goal was to perform searches based on keywords and return the results ordered by various criteria, such as document size or keyword frequency.
Candidate's Approach
During the interview, I discussed my approach with the interviewer, who seemed satisfied with my proposed logic and asked me to start coding. I implemented the core functionality, including the search feature, but I ran out of time before I could complete the ordering logic, for this I need to just sort, I told him. I explained the code and ran several test cases, demonstrating that it was functioning correctly. I communicated my approach for the ordering logic and explained how I could enhance the search functionality using a Trie data structure. Additionally, I mentioned that I would apply the strategy design pattern for different ordering criteria and addressed further questions about potential enhancements. Overall, the interviewer appeared satisfied with my performance.
Interviewer's Feedback
Two days after the interview, I followed up with HR for feedback. I was informed that the feedback was not positive. The HR representative explained that they felt I did not fully understand the problem and took the discussion in a different direction. While they acknowledged my overall performance as good, the final feedback was negative.