Coding interviews suck because of so many bad interviewers and unrealistic expectations. I was told I failed an interview loop for a senior engineer (Google L5 equivalent) because in one of my coding questions I solved it in optimal time, but not as optimal as possible. My solution was technically ~3n lg n when it could have been done in 2n lg n. You expect me to solve 2 LC mediums in 30 minutes and have them be optimized to the last nanosecond? So many interviewers are unqualified to interview. Your company isn’t a team of competitive programmers TC - 395
Bless companies who ask you to solve more practical coding problems and still pay well - easily the most positive interview experiences I’ve had. You put it well “your company isn’t a team of competitive programmers” exactly, so why should I give af about leetcode?
My favorite ‘coding round’ interview was for a company that primarily built databases. The interviewer basically guided me to write a LSM Tree based key-value store. The only downside is that it was 45 minutes, and there’s so much breadth and depth to cover there. For example, I know of a lot of techniques on concurrent control (locking implementations, multi-version system, relaxed consistency options, etc). But to talk about those options, and also code them up is a lot especially since I’ve never had to actually code a key value store before. I wish more senior interviews were like that, but we’re longer (2hrs or so). I think you would get a better look into the candidates skills. Plus it would give a better spread of the candidates skill distribution.
3n log n ? Big o notation rule #1. Drop the constant Numbers. It's just n log n. Anyone failing you for this is not following scorecard rules for the company.
Sadistic Interviewer I had similar experience for a Startup, 1 Hard + 1 Medium LC, 20min each time-bound. For 1st LC I had to implement Linkedlist from scratch first and then solve the actual LC problem in 20min Fking BS, Sadistic Interviewer was SDE2 with 6yoe And I with 2yoe was interviewing for SDE2 as well. So he intentionally fked the interview
Honestly, interviewers got worse for sure. I’ve been in the industry for a long time, recently seeing that interviewers just mark it wrong if they haven’t heard of the algorithm. Source: me. I’ve been on hiring committees reading interviewer feedback that is clearly wrong like “candidate used made up algorithm (radix sort) claiming sorting complexity better than nlogn”
Wow… they thought radix sort didn’t exist and didn’t bother to lookup or ask probing questions to try to understand.
I’m not sure if candidate ever named it but when I looked at the code it was pretty clear they were trying to use radix sort
don't worry about it - at some point people will eventually realize how stupid they're being (unfortunately it takes a while) - humans are stupid, but not THAT stupid. Eventually people will start realizing how dumb the current interview trends are. In the meantime nothing you can do about it, just try to play the game as best you can and don't beat yourself up.
I always expect code to not contain long dependency chains as well as expect memory access to be tiled if possible. Also need to use SIMD intrinsics and make implementations for both x86 and ARM. RISC-V too if interviewing for a senior position.
I got 2 medium and 1 hard 45 Min senior meta ....
lol. Sounds like you should stop building real applications and dedicate all your time to leetcode. That is what makes a good senior+ engineer.
Meta always requires 15 mins per problem.