The behavioral questions were all situational ones — things like what you'd do if a coworker disappeared and stopped doing their work. But it was all pretty relaxed. The interviewer even said he'd already gathered everything he needed. It felt good overall.
Coding round 1 was an intervals problem — similar to one I'd seen in a previous report, where you're given a bunch of [start, end] intervals and need to find how many people are online during each interval. My scenario was different, but the logic was identical. I solved it with a prefix-sum approach. It ran 45 minutes, and the interviewer and I even chatted afterward — seemed like a nice person.
Then I flew out for two onsite interviews. That experience was good too.
The first onsite coding interviewer, in New York, was very engaged and a nice person. The problem involved filling a grid with vegetables in any of 4 directions, where each type of vegetable had to be planted together in one contiguous group. At first I thought it was a BFS/DFS problem, so I drew it out on the whiteboard and worked through an example, which took about 15-20 minutes. Then I suddenly realized it was similar to a zigzag problem: fill the first row completely, then fill the second row backwards, then the third row backwards, and so on. He confirmed that was right, and once I finished writing the code he seemed very satisfied. Since I'd represented the vegetables as a dict like {A: 4, B: 8, ...}, the follow-up was what to do if everything is 0 or empty — I wrote that code too and dry-ran it.
The second onsite coding interviewer, also in New York, was a nice person too, and I solved that problem as well. It was a scenario-based question about min/max heaps, and we also discussed how bucket sort would work and why we weren't using it, plus other sorting algorithms and their time complexity. There were about 3 questions total, increasing in difficulty, but all pretty easy.
So is HC gatekeeping on school background? I went to an ordinary Chinese undergrad program (not 985/211), did a 2-year exchange abroad, and had 2 years of pandemic online classes back home. No work experience at all — went straight from undergrad into a master's program ranked around 50, had 2 internships (one at a big tech company), TA'd for 4 semesters, and have a 3.89 GPA.
I didn't feel like there were any issues — I solved every problem — and the recruiter told me the day after the interview that they were submitting me to HC. I don't understand why I couldn't get through HC.
I graduate next week in December and it feels like I'm going to be forced to go back to China. I hope the other Chinese folks still job hunting in the US have better luck. I'm really sad about it, but there's nothing I can do.
And I genuinely don't understand — did I do something wrong somewhere?
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