HR call: Two different HR people reached out to me. It was basically background chat. The first HR felt like they came out of a frat, very flippant, and asked me this kind of dumb question about why I'd choose to accept a return offer and go back to a certain company as a full-time employee. The second one asked what I wanted out of my next job, and then asked to schedule the interview right there on the spot.
phone screen: I prepared a lot of past interview questions, but none of them came up — maybe their question bank is huge, or maybe nobody's shared them.
The first question was:
input: ["foo = bar + 5", "bar = 2", "abc = 3"]
output: {"foo": 7, "bar": 2, "abc": 3}
At first I clarified a lot about the input — things like range, type, positive/negative numbers, empty input, duplicates, and so on — but the interviewer told me not to overthink it. So I just briefly said I could use a map, and the interviewer said there might be some issues but told me to just write it anyway. While I was writing, he kept interrupting me very aggressively. After I finished writing and ran the tests, he threw a new test case at me. I immediately recognized it needed DFS + memoization, but there wasn't enough time to write it, so I just briefly talked through the approach and that was the end of it.
input: ["g = abc + foo", "foo = bar + 5", "bar = 2", "abc = 3"]
output: {"g": 10, "foo": 7, "bar": 2, "abc": 3}
I probably failed. The whole interview was really unpleasant. When I interviewed at Douyin it also felt uncomfortable, but not enough to make me want to post about it. Anyway, I'm treating this one as practice and moving on.
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