ByteDance Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Easy Rounds, Then a Camera-Off Grilling in Chinese

ByteDance's recruiter scheduled my interviews one round at a time, and never told me in advance what any round would actually cover — I only ever found out the time and length of the next round.

Round 1: The interviewer was based in the Bay Area. He gave me a problem about the longest subarray of consecutive 1s — a sliding window problem I solved in seconds — with a follow-up on the 2D version. I passed, and got notified four days later.

Round 2: Also based in the Bay Area. It turned out we were actually undergrad alumni. He didn't make things hard on me when going through my resume — the whole thing was relaxed and smooth. The question was LRU cache. It's technically a hard problem, but it's common enough and high-frequency. He was friendly and patient the whole time. I passed, and got notified a week later.

Round 3: here's the important part.

The interviewer was based in China, at ByteDance. Right off the bat he claimed his device had some kind of problem so he couldn't turn his camera on — I was internally like "???" but said it was fine. (In the end, I was the only one with my camera on the whole time.) Then he insisted the entire interview be conducted in Chinese. The 45-minute process was as follows:

• He grilled my resume like crazy — not asking about my current company's projects, but latching onto the very first job I had after graduating, which lasted less than a year, years ago, and digging into it relentlessly. He even dug into tech stacks our team never actually used back then, just because he personally thought "why not use that."
• He asked a pile of rote textbook-style trivia questions, covering all kinds of topics — even stuff that felt like fill-in-the-blank questions off a college exam.
• He verbally threw a system-design-ish question at me, described in just two sentences with no other hints. I could tell it was a variant of top-K though, and I managed to work out the overall framework.
• With only two minutes left, he even gave me a brain-teaser-style algorithm question verbally, wanting me to come up with the answer purely out of thin air, in my head. I still got the correct answer and explained my reasoning.

Unsurprisingly, I got rejected. But I didn't really want to go to ByteDance anyway, so I just moved on. I'd read a lot of posts online before from people complaining about bizarre interviewers in China — this time I got to experience one myself.