YOE: 5
Online Assessment (OA):
- Given an array of words "keywords", return the keywords that are most often used in an array of sentences. In addition, given n is an int, return only the words referenced if they fall into the top n mentioned. So you have to count every instance of a keyword within the array of sentences, then return the top n keywords found.
- Not able to recall this quesetion, it was graph related.
I passed green/yellow, I assume since I didn't get the "virtual" on-site right away, instead was offered the technical coding interview. I belive I did not do well on the second question and that led to me being yellow on one and green on the other.
Technical phone screen/Coding live with a SDE2 Engineer (1 hour):
- Coding Question: Very simple tree problem, that I should have known. The problem called to find the highest weighted subpath in the binary tree and return it. The tree could be traversed bidirectionally.
- Technical Question: How would you implement a hashmap? How are keys hashed and how would you go about implementing a hash. What if there are collisions leveraging a hashmap, what would be an approach to still use that hash map and also guarenttee the clash woundn't occur?
- Behavioral/LP Question: Talk about a time where you failed to meet a committment.
Result: Rejected
They were very responsive and courterous. It was a privilege interviewing with Amazon. Definetly was not ready, need to prepare much much more and then will give it another shot.
Having knowledge of the topics that will be covered in the interview is not enough, to nail the interview we really have to understand everything in depth that could potentially be asked. I should have known how to implement BFS and DFS in my sleep. I really thought that understanding a HashMap at the end might have given me a shot at making it to the next step but unfortuantely not. Totally understand though, it is a LP to only hire the best, the best would have nailed the coding problem. With that being said I'll continue studying so I can get there! Thank you everyone for sharing your experiences!