2 rounds of coding interviews - 30 minute break - 1 system design, 1 hiring manager chat

Coding round 1: 1 hour

Had a modified version of find the nearest coordinate with the same X,Y value. It was basically the same question, it just gave a list of query points to return rather than just a single point. Overall would've been very simple, but the interviewer hardly let me stop and think and just kept trying to steer me down a specific path.

Coding round 2: 1 hour
At first the interviewer brought up the exact same question as the first interviewer. I told him I had just done the problem, so he picked another.

Ended up doing a variant of the find all palindromic substrings, but instead the problem was to find the maximum number of palindromic substrings of size k or greater in a string, where none of the substrings may overlap. Very simple changes to the leetcode question to find all palindromic substrings, just add in a check in the expand around center function that only returns if it is larger than k, and keep track of where the last substring ended and return if you've reached that point.

I finished the problem with 20 minutes to spare so the interviewer wanted to go back to the question from the previous interview since I had mentioned I hadn't quite finished it when he pulled it up at the start of this interview. The solution wasn't saved from the previous interview since it was a new CoderPad link but we discussed what I would've changed about my solution to make it better.

Systems Design: 1 hr 15 mins
Talked about a project I had worked on and drew out a diagram of how that system worked and the components it had.

Asked to design a donation system that could take $100 million in donations over a 3 day period.

HM Chat: 45 mins
Basic behavioral questions - strengths/weaknesses, how do I deal with conflict, how have I dealt with situations where I'm wrong, what was the biggest challenge I've faced, etc.

Overall outside of the first coding round I think they went pretty well. That one was kinda meh just because the interviewer didn't really let me work through the solution before he tried to steer me in a certain direction. Overall good experience.