Coding: LeetCode "Deadpool" and 272.
SD: Post Search. The deep dive mostly focused on how to quickly figure out which posts contain a keyword, how to implement excluding a keyword (for example, a post must contain apple but must not contain banana), and how to rank the returned post results by keyword frequency.
AI Coding: a roller coaster passenger-seating problem. You are given how many seats are in each row, how many rows there are, how long each run of the roller coaster takes, and how long it takes to unload and load passengers between two runs. You are also told the waiting passengers come in groups (each group has a given size, and there are a given number of groups), and each group has to satisfy some seating rule (I forgot part of the rule). You have to compute how many runs are needed in total, the total time, seat utilization, and things like that. I don't remember all the details, but the problem statement was very long! When I interviewed in mid-September I could use Codex 5.x, and I did not run into the problem older write-ups mention where the AI is hard to use. You can choose the AI's thinking level, and I leaned toward medium-low so I didn't have to wait as long and could iterate more times. At the start of the interview I also aligned with the interviewer on how much AI to use, and the interviewer said to use it freely as long as the code ran and passed the tests at the end, just treat it like a problem I ran into at work.
BQ: regular BQ.
Tech Communication: so-so.
I interviewed for the senior app track in mid-September, and at the end of September I was told I failed on SD, with a one-year cooldown. I asked whether there was a chance to be down-leveled, and the answer was that the council felt 4 years of experience was too much and not suitable for the SWE level.
This is the third onsite I have failed while interviewing and still employed. Finding a job is not easy, and I hope everyone here gets their offer!
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