Status: New grad, MS CS Top 50 US School
Position: SDE-New Grad at Intel
Location: San Jose, CA
Date: January 08, 2020

First Technical Phone Screen (1 hour) :
Two Questions on Data Structures and Algorithms were asked :

1. Maximum Depth of Binary Tree - https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-depth-of-binary-tree/
2. Find First and Last Position of Element in Sorted Array - https://leetcode.com/problems/find-first-and-last-position-of-element-in-sorted-array/

Interview went well, asked to schedule second technnical phone screen.

Second Technnical Phone Screen (1 hour) :
Two Questions on Data Structures and Algorithms were asked :

1. Linked List Cycle - https://leetcode.com/problems/linked-list-cycle/
2. Binary Tree Level Order Traversal II - https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-tree-level-order-traversal-ii/

Apart from those questions, I was asked to explain couple of projects that I had done during my Masters.
And was asked to briefly explain OO Design of the Tic-Tac-Toe game.

One week after this I was asked to schedule on-site interview.

Onsite(3 Rounds) :
Round 1 (45 mins) :
I was asked to explain one project from my Masters. I was asked to write class diagrams and thoroughly explain the flow.
Two Questions on Data Structures and Algorithms were asked:

1. Pow(x, n) - https://leetcode.com/problems/powx-n/
2. A diagram of a typical theater room was shown (with all chairs and people sitting on few of the chairs) and asked to simulate moving from one location to another, but should pass minimum number of people on the way.

Round 2 (45 mins):
First 20 mins, few technical questions on differences between C and C++, C++ and Java, and features that I like in C++11 was asked.

Coding Question:

1. A string representing a students daily attendance was given (A - absent, L - Late, P - Present), and was certain conditions were given(he shouldn't be absent for 2 consecutive days and he should not be late for more than 3 days), if those conditions were met, the student would get into trouble.
2. The question was improvised for N days. Where N also represents length of each strings, ie., if N is two each string will be AP, PA, PP, AA.. etc. He was expecting a dynamic programming solution, and I gave him a recursive backtracking solution. But he was not satisfied.

Round 3 (45 mins):
This round was with the hiring manager.
Behavioral Questions :

1. Give me an example of a time you faced a conflict while working on a team. How did you handle that?
2. Tell me about a time you were under a lot of pressure. What was going on, and how did you get through it?

One coding question:

1. Reverse nodes in k-group - https://leetcode.com/problems/reverse-nodes-in-k-group/

She also discussed about visa sponsorship, when can I join, and any offer deadlines and pending interviews with other companies.

Result : Reject. No feedback as to why I am being rejected was given.

My thoughts:

• Looking back at my interview, I feel may be that DP approach that I did not discuss in the second round was main reason for the rejection.
• This was my first onsite, though it wasn't as difficult as FAANG interviews, this was a good exprience for me to start with. Have an Amazon and Oracle interview coming up, hopefully I will do better in those.
• Number of questions we solve in Leetcode doesnt matter, understanding the concepts matters and also how you think at that moment during the interview matters. Not that it matters, I have solved 447 questions, 140 Easy, 262 Medium, 45 Hard problems.
• Communicating your thoughts to the interviewer matters a lot. Please practice this by doing mock interviews. You can do mock interviews in pramp, or with your friend, or office colleague.

As Samuel Beckett quote Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better