Not sure if I just had bad luck, or if the L5 question bank is just different, but I got hit with a really unconventional question.
No small talk, no self-introductions, straight into the coding problem. The task was to implement Python's tee iterator — you're given an iterator and need to return n independent iterators from it. I had to define my own functions and classes for it, so it had a bit of an OOD design flavor to it.
I mostly use Java at work day to day, and only picked Python back up for interviews, so I was a bit lost at first. It took me 15 minutes just to fully understand the problem, and then I wrote a naive solution first.
After that I gave my idea for the optimal solution, but I honestly don't know Python internals that well, so I was stumbling through the implementation and never fully finished it.
The BQ round was decent, but it was also different from the BQ rounds I'd had before. The interviewer spent the entire round digging into just one of my projects, a full 45 minutes on that single project alone. I feel like I ended up explaining every single detail of that project I possibly could. So my takeaway is that you really need to prepare well for BQ, especially knowing your own projects inside and out and being able to explain all the trade-offs.
My gut feeling is that I probably didn't make it, mainly because my coding round was pretty weak. I searched around and couldn't find a similar question posted here, so I figured I'd contribute this one for everyone to see.
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