Prior Experience:
4 years. Non-Big Tech. Startup / finance

Technical phone screen:
Medium - sliding window problem . design problem, Follow up O(1) Get.

Virtual Onsite:
4 coding interviews and 1 behavorial.

Location
Interviewing for MTV

Coding:

1. BFS - Similar to [Open Safe](http://[(https://leetcode.com/problems/open-the-lock/) (Medium):
   Follow Up: print the path

2. Tree Traversal ( Medium ) - Got a lot of guidance here.

3. Deduplicate a string (Easy); Backtracking over string (Medium - Hard) - Came up with Bruteforce

4. Given a path and graph find most similar path over the graph. Cost is replace distance between nodes in input path and nodes in graph. (I'm looking for a similar question to this on here). (Medium-Hard) - Came up with Bruteforce.
   Replace distance: The distance between 'AAZ' and 'AAG' is 1. Since you must replace Z with G. Now find the path that minimizes the distance between itself and some input path.

Behavioral: ( Tell me a Time ... )
How to handle bias in data
How to handle my own biases / co-worker
Conflict resolution
Team work

Preparation:
Leetcode. 250+ (80+ easy, 140+ medium, 20+hard) in 4/5 months

Overall Experience & Advice

It was a good experience in terms of setting my personal bar. I had the tools to solve the problems but wasn't fast enough to explore optimal solutions. I highly recommend timing your leetcode preperations. My next round of preperations would include 30-40 hrs of mocks + contests. You absolutely need to be able to think quickly on your feet.

Google will push your ability to handle cognitive load. Make sure your surrounding are distraction free so that you can concentrate your brain power on the problems (I had my phone ring in the middle of question 3, threw me off!). Eliminate distractions, this is super easy to forget in WFH era.

Interviewers sometimes will not be fully prepared with their question(s). Make sure to tease out all the details: input/output expected run time etc. Question 3 took me a while to tease out the input/output. This is very different than the (mostly) clearly laid out problems on LeetCode. This problem had no problem statement, it was just read out to me from the question bank. Validate the inputs / outputs with your interviewer.

Try to have as much fun as possible!