Timeline: End of July
Reschedule count : 0
Total Time spent: 60+ minutes
Pre-Join: On my First round, Interviewer didn’t show up. This one is my second round == technically my first round. I was so dumb, that I became ready and waited for the interviewer to join, But forgot to click the join link. So technically I was late for my interview 6 mints.
Joined: Cool Indian guy not so aged. I apologized for being late.
Started: Here we started with “Tell me about yourself”. As per my research, Big Tech stopped asking this, and I didn’t prepare any. So it happened, what always happened with me - FUMBLING. Any way completed it, and the question came up
The problem :
This was an open-ended question. It had literally nothing, just a log. A bunch of logs will be provided ⇒ [CheckPointName, CarNamePlate, TimeOfPassingTheCheckPoint]
I need to calculate the cost for each of the cars from it. That’s it.
Then I started making stories out of it. I discussed and fixed a design. And shaped the problem into a unidirectional graph traversal problem.
Things we came up with :
- Declare cost calculation: a unique price (suppose 5 dollars) per km, based on the distance between the last checkpoint point to the current checkpoint
- Checkpoint declaration: Distance and edges among them
- Log processing: Surely we couldn’t take the log and start the calculation, we need to process the log on the basis of Cars POV as the car is the main character here
Calculate the total task on each car as per their checkpoint visited status in one day and share as output in the form of dictionary {CarNamePlate: totalChargeOnThatCar}
(Time passed so far 25+ minutes) I regret here, I made the problem so big.
So coding started, Did not go for class-based design. Simple functional design. As there was no specific input, I needed to presume one and had a discussion, which costed me time. So any way completed the code, Almost 60+ lines with properly named variables and methods.
Then we discussed the complexities. Initially, it was N.C. where N is the number of cars, and C is the number of checkpoints. Did another modification on the graph Now became N (3N) .
(60 mint passed)
End Discussion :
No time left for discussion, As we are so damn late. Interviewer praised my code quality and naming and suggested to be faster.
Results :
Feedback not received yet.
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