Status:
~1 YOE at a fortune 500 company
Graduated with a CS major with Math minor
Came from a local university
Interview Prep:
Interview prep took me roughly 3 months. I allocated ~3 hours during weekdays towards it and majority of the weekend on it.
I started with reading through CTCI and did all the problems. There were some of the problems that I struggled with but most of them were fairly straight forward. Shortly after I moved onto leetcode. I did most of the "Explore" section. Once I finished I mainly used the random problem feature. Some concepts were easy for me and some were not. The problems that I struggled on I starred them and towards the last month of the interview prep, I solely focused on those concepts.
Phone Interview
45 minute technical phone interview on google docs.
The interviewer spent the first couple minutes asking me about my resume.
-What is your current role?
-Tell me about some of the projects you worked on?
The next 30 minute were allocated towards the technical question. The interviewed pasted the question onto google docs along with some example inputs and outputs.
https://leetcode.com/problems/balanced-binary-tree/
I heard back from my recruiter the following week and I scheduled my onsite 3 weeks later. I spent the next 3 week practicing on the whiteboard only, while only using leetcode to submit my code and checking the correctness of it.
Onsite Interview
The onsite interview consisted of 5 technical interviews. All of which were on the whiteboard. Some of the interviewers spent the whole session on the technical problem while some had a brief introduction and short QA at the end.
Round 1:
https://leetcode.com/problems/remove-duplicates-from-sorted-array/
Round 2:
https://leetcode.com/problems/pascals-triangle/ The interviewer followed with, "how would you modify your function if I wanted to find value of the kth row and nth position of the triangle."
Round 3:
https://leetcode.com/problems/n-ary-tree-postorder-traversal/ Interviewer followed up with if we wanted to do in-order and pre-order traversal, what would change.
Lunch:
Food was good, had good conversations with the guy.
Round 4:
https://leetcode.com/problems/same-tree/
Round 5:
https://leetcode.com/problems/maximal-rectangle/ This was the only problem I was not able to solved. The interviewer offered alot of help but my brain was just not working at this point.
My Thoughts
Make sure you know your Big O. Every single interviewer will ask you the big O and this is extremely crucial.
Really enjoyed the interview experience.
Very fast turnaround time between the interviews.
The recruiter was very professional to work with.