I was contacted by recruiter and screened spontaneously with 11 random but very basic CS fundamental questions. Some examples include: Which keyword would you use to change a row of data in mySQL? What are the four situations in which a deadlock can occur? I got all of them correct except one - I was not expecting an improptu questionnaire from a hiring manager though.
Then they bypassed my phone interview round and called me onsite.
I checked time and again with my recruiter but I always heard I needed to prep CS fundamentals for the interview but I could clearly see how it was different from a typical SWE interview, which I think became the main cause of my failure.
Preparation:
I gave 95% of my time and effort into LeetCode - I had not done hard level problems ever earlier and they took much longer. I shortlisted 75 medium/ hard LC problems and became thorough with them. Towards the end, I could cite the exact steps and brute force to efficient approaches that could lead me to the solution(s). But a year later, I retrospect, I was not at a stage where I could find patterns - I was working on 75 tricky questions and my cognitive abilities at that time were limited to understanding them.
For front end, I gave a few hours to async fundamentals - took a udemy course on it, this clearly did not help me. Somebody needs to teach concurrency properly to poor kids like myself, whose industry experience is limited to basic DOM manipulations and too much CSS!!
May be I was not asking the correct questions, but in 3 rounds I felt like they werent really giving me anything beyond the starting question statement, which made me wander a lot.
Interviewers were very kind, detached with my personal experiences, mainly concerned with getting the answers to their questions right and I had five rounds:
Round 1:
- Write a function that takes a list of functions f1, f2, f3 etc. as parameters and consolidates all the results into one resultant array. For ex: if there is a function animalFetcher which takes userInput and a callback as input parameters, does something with the results of these 2 functions and returns an array of results or an empty array.
Round 2:
- Design an API that takes a function & a time duration and runs the function after the given time interval. If you call the function before that time frame, it still waits till that time frame before it gets executed.
Round 3:
- Design an API that takes objects & executes them only when the previous object in the queue has executed. How will you know that the previous object has executed?
Round 4:
- Design an app like Google Express - but has drones that shop items for you.
Round 5:
I was told a story basically, which reduced to the minimum window substring