Sharing an experience for the community, hope this is useful for someone.
A friend referred me, got a call from recruiters for virtual rounds.
YOE: 1+
Currently in a startup
Tier 3 college
ROUND 1: DS/Algo round
interviewer came introduced himself and jumped to question.
Explained the problem and shared an online IDE link(dont remember which one) to solve the problem.
- https://leetcode.com/problems/next-greater-element-iii/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/subarray-sum-equals-k/
I struggled to answer the first one, took a lot of time to finally reach the most optimal solution, The interviewer was nice and kept helping me throughout, finally I was able to find the solution code it very quickly, then he said "lets try one more problem".
I had already seen the second question, so gave multiple approaches with the most optimal one, and coded it quickly.
He seemed pretty convinced at the end.
ROUND 2: DS/Algo round
Two interviewers joined the call, only one was active. Introduced himslef and asked about my current project and work. I explained him briefly, he asked a few questions on it. All the questions were simple and more around understanding my work.
I solved this using a heap based approach. He seemed fine with this and asked me to code, I took some time to code this one out, but he seemed patient throughout.
Later we discussed more ways to solve this problem and how the complexity can be handled. He was interested if I knew what is the complexity of heap creation and we discussed around how heap is implemented. Since I use Java I mentioned about priority Queue too. This too went pretty fine I guess.
ROUND 3: Design
This is the round I think I messed up. Interviewer came and was little rude honestly.
He asked me to design an ATM machine without any intro. Since I do not have much experience in these sort of deigning questions I struggled a lot.
He also was not helping, may be he expected me to come up with things on my own, I aksed a lot of clarifying questions since I was very confused.
Even at the time during the interview I knew this is not gonna work out. I kinda paniced and gave up at the end.
We did discuss a few details but then he asked me a lot of things I could not answer, even today am not sure how do I fit this as HLD or LLD, I can write a completely separate post explaining this round in details. I was/am very confused.
ROUND 4: Manager/behaviour
Interviewer joined and introduced himself, asked me a lot of questions around my work.
He was interested in the technology we are using, what type of DB, cache, AWS, etc. We discussed my project in great details. I have already prepared a template on how I would explain my current and college project so that helped a lot.
This one ended only in 30 mins.
REJECTED: got a quick email of rejection, no call or feedback provided.
My Advice: Be a little prepared for basic designs and do not panic.