Applied via employee referral. Got a call for interview in 2 weeks. Total process took 4-5 weeks.
Round 1: Technical
https://leetcode.com/problems/group-anagrams/
https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-intervals
Round 2: Technical
https://leetcode.com/problems/median-of-two-sorted-arrays
Round 3: System Design
LLD of a client side rate limiting library. Interviewer was expecting code for a rate limiting algorithm. Wrote and explained the complete code(thread safe) with a driver class depicting rate limiting based on client id. This was followed by a small discussions on what the test cases would be to test this code. How to test threaded clients here, etc.
Round 4: Hiring Manager round:
A lot of discussions about previous work experience. Some quick questions about concurreny, binary semaphores, mutex.
An open ended question on linear search in an array.
- Write an algorithm to search an element in an unsorted array.
- Now make the loop in above algorithm as unbounded.
- Can't use try/catch block to handle any errors or exceptions.
How to solve potential issues/errors in this code? I told the interviewer that unbounded loop will cause the program eventually run out of memory due to stack overflow, integer overflow,etc. Asked to increase jvm memory, try breaking the loop based on some conditions but eventually the linear search algorithm will fail for some test cases.
I tried to use some things like bit manipulations or controlling the infinite loop by some kindof hacks etc, like decrementing the loop variable 'i'. But this wasn't the answer.
His main focus was, don't use try catch, but how try catch works internally might help here. Didn't get any idea here how to approach further.
I think this is the point where things went wrong on my side. I wasn't clear about what interviewer is actually expecting as an answer.
Later on, he asked typical operational questions like how you tackle conflict? What would your manager say about you if I give him a call right now? How would you react if you don't get enough credit for your work, etc. Answered these questions confidently.
Verdict: Rejected!