Full interview timeline:
9/28 — Mass-applied.
11/3 — Received an OA invite and an HR reach-out.
11/14 — HR phone screen, asked about my basic background and some BQ.
11/24 — Tech round. They gave a rock-paper-scissors game design question with two follow-ups — you got extra credit for handling win streaks and for breaking ties. Someone on this forum had shared this one before. Then some BQ, digging into technical points based on my answers.
11/25 — Told I passed the tech round. Got the Virtual Onsite scheduled, ended up landing on 12/12. Four-round loop: the first three rounds are coding + BQ, the last round is the hiring manager round, pure BQ.
12/5 — HR VO prep call. The HR person was really nice — she told me what each interviewer in the loop would ask, even told me which LPs would come up, and gave me example questions for each one.
12/10 — One of the VO rounds got rescheduled to this day. The LP was Ownership, and they picked apart some of the projects on my resume. The algo question was LRU Cache, plus a follow-up: what if it needs to be multithreaded?
12/12 — Three rounds today.
Round 1: BQ + coding. LP was Bias for Action. The question leaned design-y — roughly, there's a notification service that bills based on subscription volume across the 24 hours of a day, with a free limit, and you need to return the total price for the day plus the charge for each individual hour. I forget the follow-up, I remember it being fairly simple. It was supposed to be a 1-hour interview but the interviewer ended up talking with me for an hour and a half — really nice person, kept encouraging me and walking through examples with me whenever I got stuck.
Round 2: BQ + coding. LP was Invent and Simplify. Every channel has a different set of followers. Picture it as being handed a map plus a channel, and you need to return the channels that share overlapping followers with that one. I started with brute force, they asked how to optimize, and I said build a follower-to-channel map ahead of time. Follow-up asked how to optimize further — BFS — but they didn't have me implement it.
Round 3: HM round, pure BQ. LPs were We Play Coop and Earn Trust. By this point I felt like the stories I'd prepped were starting to run thin honestly, my English was getting shaky too, I was just worn out.
12/19 — Today. After a full week of waiting, got the news that I didn't make it. Dream over.
Summary: all four algo questions across the tech round and the VO leaned design-oriented, nothing algorithmically hard — I guess they really care about how you communicate during the process. The overall experience was smooth, and other than the last HM interviewer giving off a pretty strong corporate-drone vibe, the whole team including HR left me with a good impression. Honestly, right after the interview I felt okay about it — I got all the coding parts done — so maybe my BQ and HM round performance just didn't meet their bar.
This was the first real interview of my life, and watching livestreams is genuinely my daily routine, so being able to start a career out of your own hobby would have been such a happy thing... too bad. I gave it everything I had, but there's really no controlling how strong the other candidates are.
Writing this post to keep a record of it, and if it helps someone else that's great too. Hoping to sort my feelings out and move on soon, and go shine at ICC.
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