Dropbox Onsite Experience

Feb 8, 2021 5 Comments

Recently had my onsite with DropBox and wanted to share my experience:

Coding 1:
Detect duplicate files in file system. Eventually got to the optimal solution but didn't complete a second question after answering the follow ups.

Coding 2:
Question was about an ID allocator. I explained multiple ways of doing the problem and asked what he wanted to optimize for. We got it down to O(1) time and O(N) space. He wanted to further optimize the space complexity. I got the solution that we could use bits instead of bytes to track ids however I wasn't sure how to do this in Java. Turns out you can use a BitSet to do this.

Systems Design:
This was a low level systems design question. I asked probing questions to get a feel for what needed to be done. We were able to narrow it down to one component of a three component system. I outlined the three components and message queues that the services would operate off of. The interviewer was not allowing to proceed here. He said multiple times, "This isn't what I was thinking" and eventually (after 15 minutes wasted) basically said "I was thinking that we would implement the queue ourselves and come up with the API". It was a very frustrating experience and felt like he wanted me to read his mind and kept giving me very vague hints as to what he wanted to discuss. Not sure what I could have done differently here.

Status: Rejected

Any tips for next time?

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