Help with Interview retrospective
I have recently given 3 interviews as a staff/principal engineer but was turned down as the feedback was moderate. Dropbox Read file char by char and find the matching input string. He had put in alot of restrictions, any how when i finished i was told it will go out of memory. I told and implemented the solution. Feedback: interviewer couldn't get to the 2nd question and he helped me in the first problem:-( Optimizely Evaluate an expression with precedence and return result 2 + 3 / 4 - 6 I implemented the solution with all outputs with out precedence and told this is how i would if i've time. Feedback: not very strong, seriously. I saw this question first time and thinking, typing nd running and validating output <45mins Appd Algorithms implementation for a data aggregation scenario, implemented nd told the time complexity, tried to optimize but didn't implement as was short on time. Discussed threading for this, we discussed thread local, atomic variables, scope for objects shared in thread. Feedback: thread knowledge could be better. There is no limit of how much one should practice, but the ones above are phone interviews. Is the interview bar gone very high? Extremely good people r available who r magical? Please objective feedback is appreciated.
Nd = and?
And
Sorry, but the ‘nd’ irritates the fuck out of me. I think you are out of memory when you read in ‘and’. Somehow the first char was cutoff.
No worries, corrected so we all can talk with less brain power. Every body is magical here
How much experience do you have? TBH when you are interviewing for staff/principal engineer level roles, there’s very little room to make mistakes. You are supposed to guide/lead/mentor other engineers on the team; if you are going to make such mistakes, then it’s a dealbreaker for a lot of hiring teams. Here’s an example of feedback that I have heard from interviewers: there were some serious issues with his/her design and we can’t trust such a person to deliver production code. If he/she needs someone to correct him/her, then let’s downlevel (which sometimes is not an option for the hiring manager). You may or may not hear such concerns for senior engineer level candidates cuz leads on the team are there to correct such flaws, so candidates are evaluated differently. Another factor that plays a major role is the title of your interviewer. If he/she is at a level lower than the role being hired for, he/she won’t ignore any mistakes. Interviewer would feel he/she is more deserving than you if you make mistakes.
I have around ~14 years of experience and have worked systems with 5k txns/sec. I totally concur your points 🙂 for the second part it's funny but true but the junior may have forgotten he knows the answer and the interviewee doesn't.
Lol 5k qps being some sort of accomplishment
To be honest, those are easy phone interview questions. The first one sounds like a distributed file problem because the file is larger than available memory, I bet the next follow up question will be like: “What if the data is too large to be contained in one machine?” The second one is a very well-known problem, it used to be commonly asked in internship interviews. I don’t understand the third one. I think you also need to work on your English writing skills.
I think you are missing the question here. The question is after implementing the answers there was still some thing missing for the next round. I haven't mention every bit of the discussions i had in the interview but i already asked these questions. I haven't mention the 3rd question and you read this far so we can communicate. I am happy they are easy for you 🙂
Weak algorithms skills. Dropbox reuses their questions a lot and they were looking for a rolling hash. The optimizely one is a leetcode hard but it's so common most people can solve it.
I have an on site for google, since I don't use specific algorithms every day so im still practicing. What other recommendations to consider?
Nd = Nextdoor?