Dropbox interview
Recently interviewed at DBX, got rejected; some of the feedback was that I didn't give a good multi-threaded solution to the web crawler problem. Somewhat puzzled since I thought I did ok on that part (the rest of the feedback was pretty-much in line with my own evaluation). Can someone (Dropboxer or not) point me to a valid solution for this problem, still bothers me = ). Thanks.
I was asked same question three years back. I am surprised that they still ask id allocation problem, multithreaded crawler and all after so many years. There is no valid solution, it is open ended. They look if you can you catch all race conditions, can you use workers and orchestrate task to those workers. I feel in production setup this would look totally different - , I would separate out producers fetching web pages and consumers using some task queue and consumers would store data on Redis for fast lookup of urls to weedout repeated ones.
I don’t see how race conditions are relevant. Worst case scenario, you crawl the same page twice in a single run. Either that’s an idempotent operation, or you end up with a slightly more updated snapshot of the page.
Considering that a good engineer will spend a few weeks working out such a design, the requirement seems to be pretty unrealistic. M two cents
Had very negative experience with dbx interview. The guy wanted me to solve problem his way. Also, took me 15 mins to understand the problem
Lol had the same experience recently. Didn’t wanna join them anyway so I started teasing the interviewer though, lol. Not impressed with the interviewer’s depth of knowledge and I’ll give him a no-hire.
Op, what level are you at and what level were you trying for? I am thinking about it for staff... And one bad interview messed it up? How long did it take for them to get back?
L65, similar senior position. I haven't quite figure out their hiring bar, but for 65+ they seem to be quite conservative.Took them about 5 business days.
Can anyone with Dropbox experience comment on the hiring bar? If they expect perfect answers I better skip/reschedule 😪
Depends on the question and the level, bar can be different. What answer did you give and I will tell you where you were missing :)
Hey man, looks like you know what you are talking about 🤗 How would you interpret a 2-week no-response, 50-50 on coding, great on rest, and 15yrs same area experience.
dpbox we don’t care much about REST, and yoe doesn’t mean you can write good code here.
Just reflect on it yourself and move on. No point in asking for a solution here.
The crawler must be perfect, as perfect as the interviewer though before walking in