Googliness Round
Questions: Specific question not provided.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate felt confident about their answers and noted that there were no red flags during this round.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Coding Round 1: Intervals Question
Questions: The interviewer mentioned at the beginning that he would ask just one question. It was an interval-based problem where multiple interval lists had to be merged into one list with certain restrictions (exact question not provided).
Candidate's Approach
- Implemented a working solution.
- Analyzed bottlenecks out loud and concluded there was no clear improvement with the current approach.
- Discussed the suggestion of using a priority queue but confirmed that the initial approach was correct.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer mentioned that the candidate's approach looked good and did not request a dry run or time complexity analysis.
Coding Round 2: Dynamic Programming Question
Questions: Specific question not provided.
Candidate's Approach
- Used dynamic programming to solve the problem and performed a dry run on the given example.
- During the dry run, the interviewer provided another example for testing.
- Suggested adding caching but realized it wouldn't be useful since every combination would be explored.
- Correctly stated the space complexity but mistakenly stated the time complexity as n³ instead of n!.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer acknowledged the candidate's approach looked good and provided clarification on the expected output, allowing time to correct the return type.
Coding Round 3: Shortest Path with Blocked Nodes
Questions: The problem was a shortest path question where certain nodes were blocked.
Candidate's Approach
- Implemented a BFS-based approach.
- Responded to a follow-up question about minimizing the number of blocked nodes by proposing a priority queue approach.
- Proactively shared thoughts on time and space complexity for both solutions at the end of the interview.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer did not ask for a dry run or a time/space complexity analysis and did not correct any of the candidate's statements.