Applied in a big October application wave. Interviewing for a junior role.
Phone screen: 1 hour, and we spent the first 15 minutes just chatting about my resume. Question 1 was a variant of a problem I only had a coded name for — it started with just () parentheses, then the follow-up expanded it to three different types of brackets. We discussed a stack-based approach versus one using a counter, and talked about which one is better for each of the two cases. Question 2 was another variant I only had a coded name for — someone had apparently posted about it before but I couldn't find that post. It's basically: given a list of words, figure out which ones map to the same sequence of numbers on a phone keypad.
Got notified the next day that I passed.
Virtual onsite:
Coding with AI: I only remember it was a BFS problem. Not hard, easy to understand, but pretty long — and the AI tool they gave us wasn't always very cooperative.
Coding: I only remember it was a LeetCode-style sliding window problem. I bombed this round.
BQ: Pretty standard questions — background, past projects, and they also asked what I thought were the problems with my previous team.
System design: top K search words.
Project deep dive: talk through a past project — I'd recommend using the whiteboard to draw diagrams.
Two weeks later I was notified I didn't pass, mainly because of code quality. One year cooldown.
Discussion
Loading comments…