Asking for myself and a couple of friends who are in the same boat:
We have been receiving interview calls and decided to take up a few interviews to get a feel. We have attended 10+ interviews each from the last 3 months. Companies range from PayPal to Google to Facebook. All the companies are based out of bay area.
While a handful of the interviews were fair (where we did well and made it onsite or did not do well due to lack of preparation related to that specific DS or Algo). But over 70% of the phone screening interview we experienced:
- 2 or max 3 questions per hour was normal. We noticed people asking upto 5 questions. (have completed 200+ leetcode)
- Regarding stories, it looks like the expectation is to tell fascinating technical learning which involves cross team collaboration, leadership, ownership and also techinal depth all in less than 60 seconds. (Have read and rehearsed the STAR method)
-Few interviewers are expecting flawless working code which you write and just run should work without any compilation errors. (Seeming not bad, but stressful when you have to do it under tough time lines)
- Expect you to be well versed in the online coding platform and its quirks like coderpad
- Some questions were biased towards Python (seeming doable in 1 hour) but when you try the same thing in Java its not do able in 1 hour. (involved lot of file reads and writes etc)
- A few email/verbal offer were rolled back because or hiring priority changes end of quarter :`(
This has been our collective experience. We just wanted to get your thought to see if you have had similar experience, any cases where switching to python helped. Or over general strategies would be appreciated as I'm a bit demotivated right now due to the above experience.
Completely understand that we need to leetcode more and we do it actively on weekends. but due to all the points mentioned above something does not make sense. Has the bar really raised so much that it melts down to your typing speed. Or are we missing something. TIA for your support and motivation.
YOE : 10
TC: 265k
comments
You actually need to do file read/write to handle input/output for these questions? So you need to know the methods to do these? Damn and mapreduce too??
Is this for regular SWE or specialized roles?
I've never seen LC questions involving this
Fundamentally, interviewing is much more of an art than science. Judging people and their capabilities quickly and correctly is a skill that most humans never develop, and those who do, do it relatively late in their life.
But think about when you started interviewing. Probably 2 years into your first job, likely in your early 20s. Likely, you simply didn't (and still don't) have the skills to judge people correctly in a 45 minute interaction.
So, we do the next best thing. We fall back on science. For the science to work, the more the data, the better the results.
Leetcode your way to heaven!
In the in person round I was asked 1. Median of Two Sorted Arrays [Hard], LRU cache, System Design (FitBit) all in 1 hour with working code and optimized solution etc.
Following round was asked a brand new question (google question) from the leetcode discussion thread that was posted 1 hour before the interview. And the interviewer did not know the expected input or output for that question :)
From your experience, what companies had the easiest interviews? What were their difficulty would you say?
It’s seems strange, Dropbox Airbnb etc should have well established interview process. I can’t imagine myself doing 4 questions in 1 hr