SDE2. YOE: 3. Hyderabad
LC: for 13 months. Easy: 50. Medium: 200. Hard: 250. :)
The whole process took around 2 weeks.
Round 0: Phone Interview
Group anagram: https://leetcode.com/problems/group-anagrams/
Variation of two sum problem..one num to pick from each array.
Round 1: Coding (1 hr)
I think i didnt do well this round.
Had trouble connecting 5 mins in chime + 5 min introduction.
Q1: Not giving exact qs. Array of 1 and 0. We need to assign one 1 to exactly one 0. One 1 can be assigned to one 0 if they are at most k dist apart. Output expected: no of 0s assigned. IMO its LC medium/hard
I took around 15-20 mins thinking out loud. Interviewer explictly asked me not to do that. Then in next 5 mins it did hit me and coded O(n) time + space sol in next 5 mins with deque. Have two deque for 0 and 1. Drop from back of queue if not in k dist from current index. Keep assinging 0 to 1 and vice versa.
Then, had to dry run and explain the code to interviewer which took >10 mins. He seemed to take some time grasping it and
did not seem fully onboarded. Although at 50 min mark he decided to close on this and switch to LPs + project discuss. (last 10 mins)
I felt he meant to ask 2 qs, also, my solution was not most appealing to him.
Later I ran my exact code in hackerearth and gfg like butter.
Round 2 : LLD + coding (1hr)
Some senior person + 1.
Started with LPs. Around 30 mins on LP.
Then the other person presented merge interval qs. Not exactly a hard one :).
Discussed and coded in 5 mins. Then mentioned O(n) approach. He stopped me midway and mentioned what if time is of higher order. I mentioned that I was about to incorporate that.
Then a weird thing happend.
I sorted it with ascending order of start time. He mentioned it should be ANDED with ascending of endTime as well. I mentioned startTime is already < endTime and no need to do that. Not sure of interviewers mindset here.
P.S: Out of doubt ran it later in LC.
Then the primary interviewer asked LLD of locker system. Mentioned few critical classes, possible quad-tree + s2 + redis set, entry/exit points of locker-zones etc.
Round 3: HM + System Design (?) (1hr 10 mins.)
30 mins of LP.
Elevator system: asked to provide with the APIs. Tried to route the direction to elevator assignment + consistency+atomicity+sharding, he instead insisted on explaning the api flow. Mentioned, binary search to locate free ones, have lift send heartBeat to admin when reached a floor-> admin will open/close door + entry/exit people etc. Wrote the basic api codes as well.
Follow up: Emergency scenario. Clarified what exctly is expected, are lifts supposed to reach ground on SOS basis etc. He mentioned about using stairs.
My approach: Have admin send emergency signal to each lift on heartBeat ack/FIFO/priority basis.
Lift class will have list of floors with stairs with them (which can be modified lazily). They can do a best effort non-stop visit to that floor.
He stopped me midway. Then again started LP QnA for next 15 mins.
One weird qs: (while discussing LPs: how would you prevent late night work
my ans: we could pre-document few stuffs + Sync offline to cut off few extra loops + while we are learning its okay to do a few late nights.)
Verdict: Reject :)
No feedback.
As always LPs can be a reason. Could be round 1. I thought 2/3 NOs are required to reject pre-bar raiser.
Any feedback/opinions would be helpful :)
Hope this helps someone. :)