Recently I took the Uber Onsite interview, I did 4 interviews: 1.- Problem solving 2.- Live coding (problem solving) 3.- Behavioral 4.- System design Then I got rejected, however the recruiter feedback was 50-50, he told me I aced the System design and behavioral (communicate ideas, etc, etc) interviews but lack at problem solving and live coding. Im not surprised since I do a lot of SD in real life. Seems like only small startups want me because I can write decent code and escalate their systems, they doesn't care if I suck at algos but I still want to work on a big company. And I had this similar case in the past with Microsoft (2x), Amazon (2x), Google and Facebook (2x).
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My guess is that you are not showcasing ability to break down problems presented to you. Smaller companies or startups are not solving for complex business problems with competing priorities. However, large corporations are and do.
Try to get a strong referral from a friend instead of working with a recruiter and see if that helps. IMO the algo questions are designed to level the playing field for freshers out of college.
I got a referral from a friend at Google and I failed him T_T
Referals can skip the tech interview at Apple?
Op, which company are you working? What system design do you do?
I work for a small CRM startup, competing against salesforce, the system design I do mostly involve service oriented architecture aka microservices, db sharding, jobs, workers and stuff like that.
Probably it will get acquired and you will make millions! Then you will laugh at people talking all the time about fang and Tc😀
Problem solving is not something you can perfect by reading a book. You need to practice a lot and spent a lot of time on it. So you need to decide if you are after really good pay grades, flexibility to transfer etc.. then go for it. Otherwise since you are good at SD that means you are good at it. Use it to your strength and when you get to a higher role, problem solving will not be needed.
Nothing wrong with you. You just didn't do your leetcoding. Think of it as refresher work for DS and algorithms class from college. Doesn't matter how senior you are, if you are interviewing for an IC role you need to do it. Also if interviewing for a first line manager role.
I have the same problem as you, OP. It took me a while to get over the idea that in order to get the job, one must play the silly game. The best players of the stupid game win the biggest prizes. Just need to prioritize learning and beating the interview game, which means a lot of review and dedicated time to practicing. I thought my general senior eng understanding of the ideas behind the problems was good enough to solve them in an interview but how wrong I was. Nothing replaces a month of prep ahead of time.
How did u clear their phone screen? Usually they are tough to crack.
do you mind to give an example of problem solving question?
Sure, one of them was something like: Given two arrays, A and B, find the largest subset of A containing all elements of B
It's basically extension of minimum window substring