Status: 8 YOE
Position: SE III at a Mid Tier Company
Location: US
Date: November 2021

I'm someone whos trying to switch to product industry after working in service industry for 8 years. I had taken several weeks break from work to do a full time preparation.This was the first time I was actually having a coding interview over a call.

Recently, I had a series of chime interview for the SDE2 role after clearing Online Assessment. Here is my experience and also the questions I got as part of this interview.

• Initially, I was told there are 3 rounds of phone/Chime technical discussions and the list of subjects included DSA, OOP, System Design , Networks etc. I was also told there will be LP discussion in every round.
• Round 1
  • this round went exactly for 45 mins and I must say interviewers are friendly. I expected we would start soon, but i had LP related questions for around 25 mins and finally in last 20 mins i was asked to solve the following.
  • How would you implement 3 stacks using an array.
  • Question was asked vague. I had to ask few clarification questions, edge cases etc before i get the depth of the question.
  • After few questions, I realized i was asked to write push, pop, peek in any of the 3 stacks
  • I was able to explain a naive approach then followed by a bit optimized apporach with some examples. However i ran out of time before i can complete the code and dry run my solution to the interviewer. I had trouble in streamlining my thoughts and convey it within time.
  • Learning: I had solved a decent number of questions in leetcode. But I realized solving a qustion over a call infront of someone is completely different from solving the questions alone. Hence my learning was to take mock interviews and practice thinking alound infront of interviewers no matter how strong we are already with DSA.
• Round 2
  • This round started exactly 30 mins after my first round and went exactly 45 mins where the first 10 mins was on LP. Interviewer then told there are 1 or 2 problems to solve depending on how much time we got
  • Assume there are chairs in a room with influencers and non influencers seated nearby. At any given instance an influencer can make the non influencers surrounded by him to become an influencer, how much time will it take for the entire room to become influencers
  • For example
    0 0 0 1 0
    1 0 0 0 0
    0 0 1 0 0
  • An influencer can convert non influencers in all 4 directions at every instance. when asked interviewer confirmed that diagonal neighbours need not be considered. For the above example, it will take 2 instance exactly for the entire array to become 1
  • I initially struggled a little bit, but the interviewer gave little bit of hints and i was able to arrive at a solution, explained with example, completed the code, discuss the tradeoffs. it was a BFS based solution.
  • However by the time code is completed, the time is up and we couldn't go to the next question.
  • Learning: I initially assumed it was an 1D array and proposed an approach, later realized that it could be a 2D array, some time was wasted in it. I learnt that I should ask as many clarifying questions to make sure to fully understand the question before jumping into solution
• Round 3
  • This round was scheduled 1 week after the coding rounds.
  • in this 1 week, I was practising mock interview with my wife and friends as interviewers. I have received some important feedbacks that I got to work on before actual interview.
  • This round went upto 45 mins and I was asked to do a System Design of a Movie Ticket Booking System. Most of the time went in discussing components and we discussed about scaling the system only in last 10 mins. Final 5 mins was LP questions.

After 2 weeks of interview, there was no response and hence I decided to follow up and then got to know I didn't get through this time. There was no feedback given or written email from the recruiter on this. I assumed that there may be plenty of candidates interviewed every single day and it may not be possible to give written feedbacks to everyone. However, I must say, through out the process, recruiters were helpful and provided a comfortable schedule and reschedules when needed. Also, the interviewers are friendly and exactly gave the right hints to drive discussion to the right direction.

Thanks.