December 2024 Interview Archive

Starting my job search for SDE position in December 2024 , here is a quick summary of the month where I eventually failed in simple interviews, taking them as learning. Will keep grinding until then -> this post might help others.

Linked In Phone Screen Round (Rejected)

Discussion started with Projects I have worked on

• What was the most complex project you worked on recently
• What is the learnings you did in last 6 months
• Questions around the tasks I did like “What are pros and cons of DynamoDB and when to use it”
• Question asked- https://leetcode.com/problems/long-pressed-name/description/

Self review -

• Didn’t give proper answers of Questions asked for projects
• Didn’t prepared enough for the talks with the interviewer to convince them that I do cool work.
• Bad code while solving the problem
• Too much edge case misses
• Overthinking rather than applying the intuition straighforward
• can try to think in silence for a while like coding in silent room

IBS Software solutions hiring drive F2F (Rejected)

Round 1 -

https://leetcode.com/problems/find-all-anagrams-in-a-string/description/

Round 2 -

• Discussion about the projects I work on currently. I am mostly not working in a full SDE role which was major drawback why my projects didn’t sounded exciting to him.
• Discussion on why RDBMS or NoSQL , how to make a choice when to choose which one. I fumbled a lot as I didn’t prepared much for databases

Question: - Given a String array with cities name , 
return a collection with city name and the count of repeated characters, 
the city names must be in sorted order.

Input:- [”Mumbai”, ”Chennai”, “Bangalore”]
Output :- {“Bangalore” : {’a’ : 2} , “Chennai” : {’n’:2}, ”Mumbai” : {’m’:2}} }

• Solved the question quickly but the interviewer required it to be written only using streams, since I didn’t used streams API and I’m not well versed with the syntax. I couldn’t write in java8 streams.

—- - - - - Round Ended in 30 minutes because I was not good with SQL and upcoming questions were with Databases - - - - - - —

Self review :

• Write a small introduction and what is do in projects to confidently speak without thinking what to tell that can excite the interviewer.
• Write more clean code and focus of time complexity & Space complexity first.
• Study and practice in Java 8 streams, this makes sure the code is short and also showcases I have used latest java features.
• Work on SQL and study HLD and LLD for such Senior Software Engineer roles. Typically a project with Databases can help. [A project with Springboot + SQl will be sufficient for this Action item]

Walmart (Rejected)

Round 1 -

1. Introduction
2. Coding Question 1 - https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-intervals/description/
3. Coding Question 2 - https://leetcode.com/problems/3sum/description/
4. Verdict - cleared

Round 2 -

LLD round

My Intution based on the other interview experiences read from leetcode, I was in a myth that java + springboot + LLD will be asked , but it was totally different as the interviewer straightly asked me to design a cache

we have to do low level design for a Cache System. Cache that we will design will have to support following operations:
PUT: This will allow user to put a value against a key in the cache
GET: this will allow user to get the previously saved value using key
Eviction: Cache should also support removal of some key in case cache is full and we try to add new key value

Expectations

Code should be functionally correct
Code should be modular and readable. Clean and professional code 
Code should be extensible and scalable. Means it should be able to accomodate new requirements with minimal changes
code should have good OOP design

It was my first LLD round but I was too much nervous and also less experience with caches which eventually sucked in my interview. I was not able come up with a good design as I have not worked or studies about design of caches. We had some discussions around my approach which was using a Map<Key,Value> , finally I got a rejection email in 2 days.

Simplotel (Ghosted 💀)

Round 1 -

Introductory Round

• Basic work related question about what I do in Amazon.
• Design a System to collect user activity from websites like Instagram and list out top 100 users. I proposed a solution using clickstream metrics sent from the frontend to backend and can rank the users based on activity. Then he asked me to scale the system. He was not convinced with the answer as he was expecting some other answer.
• verdict - Ghosted

That marks the end of the year , Only thing which I can think of is I am not deserving it right now. This disappointment comes from the hope. So lets try not to hope anything and keep working on it

Bye 2024 , lets see how your succesor does the magic...