So I flunked my google and facebook onsite interviews this month (Level: SDE5/L5).
I prepared very hard for these interviews and I actually got questions that I would have been able to solve on another day with less pressure. In both interviews, my mind just froze for 15 mins and I could not recover. I (from a friends leetcode account) had solved ~600 questions, mostly mediums, some easy and some hard (~50ish).
In fact, right after the interview on the same day, I was able to write the code and test those questons in less than 20 minutes. This is what has been keeping me awake in the night, I know I could have solved those questions but anxiety got the better of me this time.
Sadly, I am gonna have to wait another year to give Google and Facebook another shot. Feel really down at the moment. I am writing here because Leetcode and the community has been very very helpful to me.
Ironically, I also interviewed with Amazon before google and facebook. I wanted to get some practice under my belt. I was quite relaxed for that interview and I got an offer from them. Its a good offer but the work may not as good as I would have liked.
How do you guys deal with anxiety/pressure in interviews? Would you suggest anything to prepare better next year?
Questions asked to me by these companies:
Amazon:
- Convert.a read/write system call that takes 512 byte aligned offset/size and reads from a block device that can read/write 4k aligned
- https://leetcode.com/problems/online-stock-span/
- https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/345744/Google-or-Onsite-or-Merge-K-Sorted-Iterators/314694
- Design dropbox
Google:
- Design a URL phishing verifier
- Variation of https://leetcode.com/problems/validate-stack-sequences/
- Some DP problem about finding optimal VM allocation of a physical machine.
Facebook:
- https://leetcode.com/problems/integer-to-english-words/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/flatten-binary-tree-to-linked-list/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/remove-nth-node-from-end-of-list/ (Phone screen)
- Design web crawler
PS:
I am overwhelmed by the responses here. Thank you so much for the kind words. I cant say enough how much this means to me.