March 26: first round, the screen. Two medium questions — one I'd never seen before, and the other was a variant of vertical order traversal. I'd actually only grinded 32 problems total, and somehow I passed. Still feels like a miracle.
Onsite was on the 2nd. Let me update on that too. Four rounds total, as follows:
-
System design. The interviewer was very nice, and the topic happened to be a system I hadn't reviewed at all — I just gritted my teeth and answered. He asked a lot about how the database's keys and values were designed. I hadn't reviewed much of the low-level database stuff for system design, so I couldn't answer. You could tell he really wanted to help me get there, but I genuinely couldn't come up with it.
-
Behavioral. Great atmosphere. Just asked about how I handled conflict in projects, plus priority, leadership, and collaboration questions — nothing technical at all.
-
Coding. One easy, one medium. The interviewer seemed really friendly, kept nodding along to encourage me. The first question was a classic, high-frequency LeetCode tree problem. The second was probably a variant of some LeetCode two-pointers problem, though I couldn't actually find it on LeetCode.
-
Coding. One easy that I don't even remember — I'd done this exact problem before and still forgot it, which pissed me off. One medium was LeetCode's Binary Tree Right Side View, which I'd practiced before the interview so I solved it directly.
I didn't pass the onsite, but the overall interview experience was really good. Everyone's questions were reasonable — not answering was on me, I just hadn't prepared enough. None of the coding interviewers threw a hard problem at me; everything was medium or easy. Maybe research roles just don't have as crazy a coding bar?
The recruiter only gave me the final result, no details. My own guess is it was the system design round. The interviewer really tried to help me get there, but I still didn't answer it well. Next time I really need to prepare system design properly.
Discussion
Loading comments…