Background: 1 Yoe, CS Bachelors grad.
Had 1 phone interview, 4 coding and 1 GNL.
Phone Interview:
Round 1:
- Interview started 15 minutes late so asked only 1 question - https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/diameter-n-ary-tree/
Gave the solution pretty much straight away, ran it on an example, coded it and tested it. Missed out an edge case though which the interviewer pointed out.
Round 2:
- Chocolate Sweetness
Follow-up: can we optimize the split function from O(N)? Yes - cumulative sum and binary search makes it O(k*logN)
Round 3:
- Felt like the interviewer was not interested at all during the interview. He gave me a question and went out for a phone call, I had to solve the question while he was out.
- Variation of https://leetcode.com/problems/most-stones-removed-with-same-row-or-column
Given coordinates (double x, double y) of balls, if there are 2 balls in same row or col you can remove any one, return max no. of balls that can be removed. Quickly coded that one and spent most of my time on the next one. - https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-xor-of-two-numbers-in-an-array
Gave the naive solution immediately but struggled with the optimal solution. Interviewer said that I was close but did not code anything.
Round 4: [Googleyness and Leadership]
- Nothing too tough, mostly related to stuff on my CV plus questions like how do you deal with problematic teammates, most difficult/rewarding problem you've solved in your career etc.
Round 5:
- https://leetcode.com/problems/palindromic-substrings
Got to the DP O(N^2) time O(N) space solution quickly. Interviewer said he wanted better space complexity, I could not figure out the 2 pointer approach. Interviewer gave me a hint near the end of the interview, and was able to solve and code the optimal one.
Recruiter was mostly pleased after seeing the feedback from first 4 rounds (I had 3 and 2 interviews on separate days), really blew it in round 5. The interviewer had planned to ask another question.
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