Subtitle - Fool me once
This is my experience of interviewing with Docusign. Friends I Coronavirus against my better judgement decided to take a chance interviewing with Docusign.
Phone interview:
Pretty simple adding two numbers in linked list.
https://leetcode.com/problems/add-two-numbers/
I wrote the code and the interviewer said it was good. I however found a bug and pointed out to the interviewer.
In a week, I was invited for an onsite.
I walked into the office in one of the high rises in Seattle. The first impression of the office was, it looked like a sanitarium. White walls with nothing, everywhere you look, you feel you are locked into a closet.
Sign in: I tried to sign in using their docusign sign in system, it did not work firs time. I tried again, and it went through.
One thing they start the interview after lunchtime and it could last for above 4 hours so always carry some snack. I for one cant go through 4 hours without getting a proper snack.
First interview was with the manager, he was trying to sell the job and did not have any real technical question.
Second interview with a guy who brought in a puzzle, it took me sometime to understand the puzzle. Once I understood it, it was a simple recursion with backtracking. I wrote the code most of the way. The interviewer mentioned the complexity was quadratic. It was not it was exponential. I wondered about this dude, he was asking this question but had no clue about the complexity. I explained why it wanot qudratic he got it. The question itself is pretty simple but I have never seen the puzzle so it took time to understand it.
http://jetheis.com/blog/2011/12/31/solving-one-tough-puzzle/
The next one was prime numbers under n. I just wrote a simple algorithm to keep the list of primes and divide the numbers by the preexisting primes. There was no bugs, it took me like 10 minutes to write it. Then we talked about optimizations and Eratosthenes algorithm. I finished early so I asked if there was another question, he said no.
Next interview was with a guy who wanted me to design a key value store. I started giving options like using a DB, or using a log and hashtable in memory etc. Here is the thing, this guy looked zoned out. The conversation for design usually is a two street, you provide some options talk about the pros and cons, so the discussion can continue. Nothing from this guy.
Last interview with a guy who wanted me to find the unique words in a file. It looked simple, I said, I could use a HashSet and use it to do this. Then he asked how to do without HS I said I could sort the file and I can do a single pass skipping the duplicates. I wrote the code for it. I was somewhat shocked by the simplicity of the coding qs asked.
At this point, I was very hungry and ready to be out of there. I got out there as fast as I could,