Status: New grad, BS CS low rank state school
Position: SDE1 New Grad
Location: Atlanta, GA
Date: September 21, 2021
Technical phone screen (30 mins):
- Purely behavioral questions, resume questions, and explain recursion to a 5 year old
- Also asked what languages do I know, and really cared about my knowledge of C/C++
Onsite (4 rounds):
Interview 1:
It was some guy who said he was doing robotics in Azure datacenters. He was clearly not in a mood, didn't react to any jokes. He asked me about my resume and said that he liked it.
After that, we moved on to the Codility. He asked me to build a QR encoder/decoder, given 12 extended ASCII characters return a 10x10 matrix of 0 and 1s. I've built the thing in 4 minutes, but then he made add a debug mode to it and test a case with 3 letters. It didn't work as he wanted. He started throwing random suggestions for improving the "debugging mode" that threw me off the rails and eventually when I finished dealing with his suggestions and actually focused on my code, the time ran out. (The encoder worked as he wanted, so I did finish it) I did not understand if I had to build the decoder too.
Interview 2:
It was the only interview I enjoyed. It was with a Principal SD. He asked me this question https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-tree-zigzag-level-order-traversal/ and since I saw it before, I easily solved it. What was interesting for me is that he asked me why I am looking for a job for 4 months already. Saying that I am an incompetent, useless person would not be very beneficial, I came up with a typical "It's covid, you know?" answer.
Interview 3:
It was another grumpy, tired guy, who initially went over typical behavioral and resume questions and moved on to the coding problem.
He wanted me to write a function that would delete a tree, given a root node. So I gave him a recursive function that first handled children and then freed up the memory of the parent. I initially forgot to add the condition to handle the null argument, so he gave me a hint about that. Then he moved to pointing out that let's say we are working on a processor that has no memory. So I took it really close to my heart and thought that I will have NO memory AT ALL, not even space for a single variable to keep the current node, besides the head node. And it threw me off the rails for a bit. He then explained that I can do that, meaning that I misinterpreted "I want you to do it with O(1) memory". In the end, I managed to do it and he said that this is what he wanted.
Interview 4:
This round was with the most annoying guy. First of all, he started grilling me about my internship. During my internship, I had a project improving random functionality, and he asked me who my customers were. I told him who the customers of the company were, and he then asked, what feedback they gave me. I was like... dude, are you serious? Is this like a standard in EVERY company to let random SWE interns talk with customers directly? I told him that I never talked to customers and then he asked "Then who gave you feedback?". I don't know, there are those people called full-time software engineers, maybe you've heard of them.
Then, he asked me https://leetcode.com/problems/search-a-2d-matrix/, which I saw before, but I didn't soak it in. So, during the interview itself, I only remembered that I need binary search, but I forgot how exactly I need to modify it for 2d matrix. I wanted to code up basic skeleton (like vectors and some variables) to buy myself some time to think, but he told me to stop and explain what I want to do. I got stressed, because I myself didn't exactly know what to do, so I threw some random brute-force idea. And he then suggested to start looking at the center of the matrix, and I was like, yeah, let me try that. I then started explaining what I wanted to do and he decides to tell me to look at corners of the matrix. It got me confused even more. In the end, I barely coded anything.
Other Info: Applied with a referral, LC: 130 (41,75,14), 1 internship
Hope it helps someone! Cheers fellow LeetCoders!