Date: January 2020 - March 2020

Phone screen 1: (Mid November 2019)
Straight forward Word ladder, but with bits instead of letters. Took a few hints and some time to answer the follow-up question, which was to also print the path. Hence, had to go through another round.

Phone screen 2: (End November)
Simple tree based question. Had to find a number in a tree with some special properties. Don't remember the exact details. Solved it.

Onsite: (End January: Long gap due to Christmas)
My onsite was in Bangalore.

Round 1 : Medium level DP question. Fairly straightforward and I quickly identified it as DP. Had to maximize the profit given some costs. Had around 15 minutes left and was asked World ladder again! Went very well.

Round 2: Had to model the given question as a tree and then find the max cost to reach any node from the root node. DFS. Follow up was to model it as a graph, for which I had to use Dijkstra. Coded the Dijkstra version. Went very well.

Round 3: A string problem. Had to find the shortest string which doesn't occur in the given boolean string. This was pretty interesting because I had to optimize for memory and not for time. Each followup had a stricter memory constraint and some additional requirements. I was given input and memory limitations in mega bytes. Took a few hints.

Round 4: Array based question related to taking snapshots of the array. Had to implement few methods. Found out later that this question was added to Leetcode recently. Took a few hints. Next, I was asked a simple tree question, no coding was required.

Round 5: Pretty tired at this point. Had to find a path in a maze. Started off as a Medium level question and then progressed to a Hard level question. Hard one is on LC. Just managed to give sub-optimal solution after taking hints and could not even answer the Hard question.

HR: (Mid February)
Apparently there was a mistake in scheduling the rounds and I still had to give the HR round. Typical HR questions.

At this point, I felt I had a decent chance if they considered the first 4 tech rounds. But, a month later, I got a call saying I will have 2 more virtual onsite rounds since they still had to test my problem solving skills.

Virtual onsite: (End March)
Apparently, I needed to take 2 more rounds to further test my problem solving skills. It had been months since I prepared and I have a terrible memory, hence had forgotten almost everything. Had just a week to prepare for this. I had no motivation at all to prepare from scratch yet again and was feeling frustrated.

Round 1: Given a lot of intervals, had to find the number of intervals present in a given range. This was not direct. Took some time to figure out this was what they were asking for.
It had been a very long time since I had done an interval-related problem and hence screwed this up completely. Also, the lack of a white board for this question was a huge drawback. Anyway, I managed to give an oral solution to a part of the question but couldn't code it well. The solution is to use binary search. Wasn't allowed to use libraries for searching though, which further added to the problem. Completely bombed the round.

Round 2: This was more of a discussion on how I would design searching and ranking of documents and optimizing it. No coding involved. Went very well.

Round1 of the second onsite was obviously the reason I was rejected. I felt bad that the result was kind of determined by just one weeks preparation. In total I solved around 200 LC questions. Also, the process lasted for around 6 months due to Holidays etc which was just bad luck. I burnt out mid way and got tired of Leetcode.

My advice:

• Get premium and go through the latest questions in LC tagged with the company you are interested in. I probably would have got the offer after the first onsite itself if I had done this.
• Practice explaining your solution on a Google doc. Especially for trees, intervals etc. I had plenty of practice coding on a Doc.

Anyway, the recruiters and co-ordinators were very professional and helpful at every step. It was an amazing experience overall.

Journey before destination.