Coding:
Design an in-memory key-value store that supports set, set, count(value) (how many keys currently hold this value), begin, commit, and rollback.
This interviewer would easily rank as one of the worst interviewers I've ever had. He didn't communicate with me at all the whole time. Here's how it went: he said he was turning his camera off and I should spend a few minutes reading the problem first. When I said I was done and asked if I could walk through my approach, he turned his camera back on. After listening, he said again, "I'm turning the camera off, you write code for ten minutes." I was speechless. The whole interview went like that — camera off, camera on, camera off again, zero communication. When the camera was on and I was asking clarifying questions, he was just looking at his phone??? Completely ridiculous. Even as a mock interview this would have wasted my time.
System design:
Design a chat system where one person can send a message to multiple people at once (not a group chat) — the message can only be viewed once and gets deleted right after it's read.
I don't know why, but he kept getting stuck on asking me why I'd use consistent hashing. I even explained the principles of L4, L7, and consistent hashing to him and told him it wasn't important, but he kept dwelling on it. Then he even asked which specific load balancer product I'd use... I was speechless. Does that really matter? Isn't what matters the type of load balancer, not the specific product?
I feel like neither of these interviewers was very good. Judging from the interviewers, the company might be a bit toxic. That said, the phone screen interviewer was pretty nice, though that round also had three medium algorithm questions, and the third one was a DP problem.
Discussion
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