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No, the first round is usually a timed coding interview where the goal is to get an optimal solution as fast as possible. You should not be talking much with th
by WinLychee 3y ago
No, the first round is usually a timed coding interview where the goal is to get an optimal solution as fast as possible. You should not be talking much with the interviewer. The intro (if there is one) is a quick exchange of names and last job worked at, then immediately diving into coding problem. You cannot start with a naive solution, interviewer will ask you to skip and go straight to optimal (this happened to me more than once). If you solve that, they ask followup questions to probe your knowledge, and if you beat that, you get a second problem.
After that might be more rounds of coding, system design, and hiring manager interview.
The part where you can be charismatic is once you pass the initial technical bar(s). The talking/behavior is a later point in time and is relatively easy IMO.
Examples of questions I've been asked:
1) https://leetcode.com/problems/non-overlapping-intervals/ https://leetcode.com/problems/non-overlapping-intervals/
2) https://leetcode.com/problems/design-add-and-search-words-data-structure/ https://leetcode.com/problems/design-add-and-search-words-da...
3) https://leetcode.com/problems/detect-cycles-in-2d-grid/ https://leetcode.com/problems/detect-cycles-in-2d-grid/
4) https://leetcode.com/problems/evaluate-reverse-polish-notation/ https://leetcode.com/problems/evaluate-reverse-polish-notati...
5) https://leetcode.com/problems/word-search/ https://leetcode.com/problems/word-search/
So nothing too hard but you have to instantly solve it, and optimally. The hardest one I got was some type of AI search problem, where you have to find a way to navigate obstacles in a 2d grid, and another geometry problem I've not seen before.
Along with this questions like: what pitfalls arise in concurrency? Explain how you would design a pointer type that can be shared between threads, what is epoll? How do you debug a distributed system? etc.
- throwaway2037 3y agoJesus Christ: Where are you interviewing? This sounds more like Stephen King's The Long Walk, than a job interview! Do they hold a gun to your head while you regurtitate the optimal solution?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fnimick 3y agoHave you interviewed recently? The vast majority of companies won't even have a conversation with you until after you've jumped through this.
- jkachmar 3y agofwiw in my experience it's entirely possible to avoid this if you don't submit an application "cold" (i.e. through the careers page), but through a recruiter or referral _IF_ you have a strong portfolio of open source work and/or exposure in technical spaces. i'm more than happy to do take-home assignments or complete reasonable timed assessments, but i have (politely) refused to complete leetcode-style gotcha screens when they have been presented to me as "just another part of the application process". idk, though. maybe that's a privileged statement based on my position, but from what i can tell grinding leetcode seems to be much less reliable these days & the toll it takes on a lot of folks is pretty significant.
- komali2 3y agoI have but haven't had anyone ask me leetcode questions yet. Everyone's just been asking about my precious jobs. I also have an ok amount of public projects, maybe that's why? If someone asked my to do a leetcode style problem I'd politely refuse, and likely end the interview. I went through that kind of job hunt at the expense of my mental health and confidence in myself as an engineer once. It was one of the most degrading experiences of my life (so in all not a bad life to be fair). I'll never do it again.
- komali2 3y agoPrevious jobs*
- jimbokun 3y agoThis would be funny if it wasn't so sad. When people started asking these questions, the whole point was to see how people reason about a new problem they haven't solved before. There are almost no work problems that require you to regurgitate something verbatim you saw on leetcode before. It's seriously making me question the intelligence of these interviewers. Although at the same time I realize it's mainly just to arbitrarily whittle down the applicant pool to a smaller number you can interview in person.
- zcmack 3y agoit is very sad. i personally would much rather someone walks through their problem solving approach and identifies shortcomings/edge cases than to regurgitate a memorized algorithm. it's really easy to identify code that is not optimal at code review time. it is far more challenging to have a conversation with a algorithm-regurgitating robot that their entire approach was wrong because they misunderstood the abstraction or that their code wasn't needed because Larry is refactoring that part of the system to a separate service already.
- gered 3y agoYup. It's absolutely crazy to me to see the amount of people who are apparently doing hiring telling others here in the comments (and elsewhere on HN, etc) that they should "grind leetcode" while also NOT admitting that this is absolutely stupid. Like I'll give you a pass as an interviewer / hiring manager if your hands are unfortunately tied and you can't change your companies hiring processes. But if you're an interviewer or hiring manager who is telling people to "grind leetcode" because you legitimately believe this is a good way to find good talent ... you need your head examined. All you're doing is filtering for people who've grinded leetcode long enough to memorize solutions. This has ZERO correlation to software development ability.
- neon_electro 3y agoAppreciate you putting these words together. More employers need to hear it.
- formulathree 3y ago
- evantbyrne 3y agoThat is fascinating. I wouldn't even show up for an interview if they told me to prepare for that kind of exam. What kinds of companies are these and where are they located? Sounds like an interview designed by an omega nerd nightmare boss.
- formulathree 3y agoHave you been interviewing recently? The qualitative interviews that test design are actually the ones that are unreasonably challenging now. You have to cater to the interviewers design philosophy. For example I tend not to prefer putting data into a class if it's not needed, but we had one interviewer who wanted all my logic as methods on a class even though it's fine to have functions operating on a data structure. Not a big deal either way right? But there it is... With the influx of candidates they measure this bs.
- WinLychee 3y agoIf you view the list here: https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/ https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/ you will see the questions tagged by company (there is a paid option as well). If they have a name you know, they probably do this style of interview.
- evantbyrne 3y agoI don't understand what I'm looking at. Who is tagging companies? Why would leetcode know the specific questions people are being asked to whiteboard?
- jselysianeagle 3y agoPeople who interview at these companies report on their interview experience. It's true, these leetcode style questions do get asked and not just by the FAANG companies but lots of much smaller, no-name companies as well. Yes, you can certainly find companies out there that don't interview in this way, but leetcode interviews are extremely common.