Position: SWE 2020 new grad
Date: April 2020
Result: got invited for virutal onsite somehow lol
Phone screening started great, few conversations about our day and cracked a few jokes about being stuck at home.
I was asked to give a brief introduction and talk about my resume for a little bit, then started into the technical portion on HackerRank coder pad.
He gave 3 questions:
- Verify palindrome (easy clap) https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-palindrome/
- Minimum suffix needed to create palindrome https://leetcode.com/problems/shortest-palindrome/ (but suffix instead prefix)
- Minimum characters needed to create palindrome https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-insertion-steps-to-make-a-string-palindrome/
For 1, it was simple enough and he was happy with the answer
2 was where I fucked up. I failed to find the optimal solution and was stuck on doing the brute force method. To clarify this question was asking, what is the minimum suffix needed to create a palindrome for any string. ex. Banana -> bananab.
I ended up starting from the last character of the string and expanding pointers to find palindromes and added the remainder to the end which was a brute force method. The interviewer tried to work with me but I unfortunately could not understand him so I kept going the same path. The optimal solution that he mentioned was start with the whole string and check if its a palindrome, then add the remainder front portion to the end in reverse. then i + 1 and continue.
At this point we ran out of time and he gave me question for number 3 but just told me to explain how to solve. To clarify the question was asking what is the last amount of characters you need to add to a string to make it a palindrome. For example apple -> elappale. I had about a minute to clarify the question. I said that I would keep a count of each character and the ones that were odd, I would add to make it even thus making a palindrome. I didn't have time to check for the case that the string length is odd or even.
At the end he sounded pretty dissapointed and I agree, I did fuck up bad (I was so nervous). But at the end it was good experience. I never had an interview with a big tech company (even though it was a phone screen) but it led me to studying very hard on leetcode problems and I think I am a better problem solver now. Not good enough yet, but maybe soon.
why they gotta give me 2 hards tho lmao
Phone screen was 45 mins long.