Status: New grad, BA CS Top Public School
Position: New Grad Bloomberg SWE
Location: NYC
Date: March 2019

HR Screen:
Set a time with the recruiter for the initial coding phone interview. Got ghosted. No call or email during the set time. I emailed the recruiter and scheduled something for the following week (no sooner times were available).

Phone Screen:
My actual phone coding screen lasted a bit over an hour and consisted of several problems. Like a lot. I had read people got maybe 1 or 2 questions. I got 5, which frankly I wasn't expecting.

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-palindrome I did it iteratively and then the interviewer followed up wanting the recursive solution.
2. https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-tree-inorder-traversal iterative solution. I got lucky since I had just done this problem on leetcode a few days before the interview.
3. Generate a random number between 1-7 given a function that returns a random number between 1-5. Can't use any other random library to complete function. Had no idea how to do this quite honestly. Told the guy that and moved on.
4. Remove extra spaces from string in place. Example: "hello__world_there" -> "hello_world_there" (Spaces are shown as underscores)
5. Merge and sort contents of very large file (too large to fit into memory). I don't remember what I said to be honest.

Didn't think the interview went phenomenally but still passed.

Onsite:
2 1-hour interviews each with 2 LC problems.

Round 1:

• Write a system that you can add numbers to and then return a random number out of those.
  ex: [1,4,7,9]
  random num = 2
  returns 7 and resulting list is [1,4,9]

  Stumbled on this question but was able to get it with a bit of help. In retrospective I should have gotten this question rather easily.

• Questions about resume and previous internship that was in NYC.

• Given 2 strings what is the number of changes to one of them for the strings to become anagrams.

• Ran out of time but gave a high level approach and interviewer seemed fine with the proposed solution.

They gave a sandwich to eat for lunch but only gave me 10 minutes between interviews so I didn't want to wolf it down between my rounds. Just ended up eating it after the interview ended.

Round 2:

Had a hard time understanding what the interviewer was saying. He barely spoke english.

• https://leetcode.com/problems/top-k-frequent-words Told the interviewer right off the bat that this problem was best solved with PQ but since Python doesnt have a good built in one I'd solve it a different way.
• https://leetcode.com/problems/word-search Got most of it but got stuck exiting the recursion

Supposedly if you pass the rounds you make it to a behavioral interview. Knew I didn't pass when I got asked to leave after the second round. The elevator ride down with the random person escorting me out was super awkward.

When I got to the exit I realized I forgot my sandwich in the interview room. So I had to go back up like a dumbass. Walked to Central Park and ate my sandwich there. It wasn't a good sandwich (._.)