Current company: Startup & Remote, 2024 batch
YOE: 5 months

Round 1: HackerRank OA, 3 questions, 90-minute time limit (difficulty: medium-hard).

Round 2: LLD Design
They asked me to complete Poll (somewhat like WhatsApp poll) API/methods. The tasks were: create poll, delete poll, update poll, vote on a poll, and print the final results of the poll.

They also gave a rough idea about the poll object, which was expected to contain a list of questions. In the update poll method, the user could update a question for a certain poll ID.

I implemented all (except for the bonus: implementing multi-threading). The interviewer was friendly. I managed to drop him big hints through the conversation.

Verdict: Hire

Round 3: DSA Round

1. Some average competitive programming question. I was given an array and asked to use some divide operation (always divide by 2^i) to reach the minimum sum. I can't remember the exact question, but the solution approach was to use brute force and a priority queue (low-medium difficulty).

2. Minimum Number of Taps to Open to Water a Garden (LeetCode, hard)

3. Implementation of heap (theoretical), heap sort, and heapify. I was asked if we can remove a certain element in logn time from a heap. I told him that other data structures, like a BST, are better suited for this requirement. Then he asked why two data structures are needed when a BST is sufficient. He mentioned that the max element can be found using a reverse BST iterator. The discussion continued from there.

The interviewer was very good.

Verdict: Strong hire

Round 4: Hiring Manager Round

1. Basic HR questions and project discussion at the current company, followed by two design problems.
   • Implement a system where the inventory is limited, and we need to prevent users from checking out if the stock is too low. For example, if only 5 items are left and 1000 people try to check out, 995 transactions should fail, and only 5 should succeed. I told him about row locking and some lock methods. I gave him some other concurrency methods, since i was not prepared well for this round, i was relating that problem to serializablity from dbms. he was not able to provide hints to me. he was appearing satisfied tho.
   • Design of game player allotment, where on a leaderboard, if a player joins, we need to assign them a random player with almost the same rating, then update their rating on the leaderboard. I wasn’t sure, so I suggested an approach using hashing buckets. He seemed satisfied with that, though he didn’t give me any hints during the interview.

Verdict: No hire

The LLD and DSA rounds were scheduled on the same day.

Overall Verdict: No hire

What i learnt: Start preparing for desing problems , they are mainly focusing on three things DSA , LLD, HLD

comments:

1. I applied through a referral, and the position became available about 3-4 months ago.
2. The system design interview was entirely theoretical.
3. I didn’t receive any feedback; I was informed by a friend who referred me that I performed strongly in the DSA round.
4. During the DSA interview, they expected complete and runnable code, and I was able to solve all the problems presented.
5. I graduated from a tier 1 college and had 5 month fte experience. and 2 month intern experience. (total 7 months )
6. In the online assessment, I successfully solved all questions.

PS
This dude asked me sde 3 round problem.

Currently i am working with another company, Remote & hike was 75%.