Title: New Grad
Location: NYC
Decision: Reject

I gave phone round on 10th jan 2022 (45mins), Interviewer was friendly, we spoke about resume for 20mins and then started with the question: Go for optimal solution
https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-palindrome-ii/

Onsite: Jan 31st 2022: usual 20mins on resume and then questions.

There were 2 rounds (45mins each):
first round was with junior engineer, below were the questions asked:
https://leetcode.com/problems/meeting-rooms-ii/
https://leetcode.com/problems/design-underground-system/

I had solved these questions, so i was able to do well.

Round2:
Round2 was with senior engineer, question was something like this

INPUT: given 2 character arrays as shown below
p1 = ['A', 'B','C','E','G','D','B']
P2 = ['A', 'B','A','C','E']

OUTPUT:
part1: Give the intersection: ['A', 'B','C','E'] he didnt specify if it has to be in sorted order, just the intersection.

part2: Give the characters sorted by frequency: ['A','B','C','E','G','D'] no need to sort lexicographically if the frequencies are same, just any order is fine

I was able to solve it using dictionary and sorting with time: O(nlogn) but then he asked me to solve it in O(n) and so I solved it using bucket sort.

He said memory will be wasted if count of some character is too big, i couldnt optimize it further as it was almost time.

a week later i got reject.

Overall it was a good interview experience, Let me know if you guys have a better solution for round2.

Hope this helps, Thanks