The interview experience itself was actually pretty good in one sense — just spray and pray, blindly mass-applying with your eyes closed, and there's a decent chance you'll land some phone screens. I landed four HR calls total: one slot already got filled, another is still waiting to be scheduled, so right now I've actually done two phone screens. But honestly, the experience itself was not great.
The first one was with a very gentle interviewer. Her team uses C++ and she probably doesn't know Java, while I only know Java, so we ended up talking a bit past each other during the coding part — I'd say "the input is a map" and she'd say "use a dictionary." We fumbled around for a while and didn't get through both questions. Then I didn't even get an official rejection email, just silence. TAT
Question 1: you're given a bunch of exceptions, each with a parent and children, but the input never tells you what a node's parent is — only what its children are. It's kind of tree-like but not a binary tree, and you need to find the root node. The input looks something like {id: 1, child: {2, 3}}, {id: 2, child: {4, 5}}, etc. I overcomplicated it — I thought it was "find the common parent," but it wasn't. By the time I realized that, it was too late, I'd already finished coding it. Not sure if this is a known LeetCode problem.
Question 2 I didn't have time to finish coding. It was an OOD (object-oriented design) question.
packetit(0x04, "a", "b", "c") // Incomplete, because it was stated up front that this packet's size is 4, but only three items have arrived so far — return nothing.
packetit("d") // returns "abcd", because adding it to the previous three reaches a size of 4.
The second phone screen was labeled "hardware engineering." That day I was also prepping for a different onsite, and after how the last one went, I figured — as the saying goes — life and fortune are up to fate. (My theory about their process: HR screens resumes, but for people who get to the phone screen with a background that doesn't quite match — like me — they try to find a way to fail you early; for people who do match, they try to find a way to save you.) So I walked in with zero prep. I'd call this experience absolutely terrible. The moment I turned my camera on, I saw two interviewers with very heavy accents, and honestly I just wanted to say, let's not pretend, this is exhausting for both of us, just go ahead and fail me.
Their accent was so heavy that even for someone like me, who's been grinding away in the tech industry for years and can basically do simultaneous interpretation of that kind of accent, it was a huge challenge. Without seeming to have read my resume, they started off firing a bunch of detail questions at me, plus some pretty ridiculous ones, tag-teaming back and forth to kill time before actually getting into the problems.
The first question was a classic LeetCode problem. I hadn't done it before, but I still proposed the best approach — and the two of them kept interrupting with things like "why do you need a helper function here," which felt like a pretty silly thing to ask. I'd already expected this kind of thing going in, though. Before I finished writing it, they cut in again saying we were running out of time and to move on.
The second question was even funnier. They gave me a few examples, like a binary tree as input:
c
\
i
\
a
Output: cia
I don't remember the other examples, just that it wasn't an inorder traversal or any common traversal I knew. I said we could look at each node's row and column — use BFS to figure out which row it's in, then DFS to figure out which column. He said "okay, so how are you going to compute the pattern for me?" I asked what exactly he wanted me to compute, and he said it's related to rows and columns and he had no obligation to say more. At that point I was basically thinking: you two must be tired of putting on this act too, it feels like you want to have some fun at my expense, and I'm not going to play along, which is probably tiring for you as well. So that's it, I can't solve this one, goodbye. That said, since I had no expectations going in, I wasn't disappointed either — I just felt like my precious time got wasted.
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