Dropbox phone interview
Yesterday I had my dropbox phone interview late evening. got a variant of leetcode dropbox question which I had solved before. I explained my algorithm, then I went to coding the algorithm. I did a code walk through. There was 1 mistake that the interviewer pointed out. I corrected it immediately. I gave the complexity of the algorithm. He said it looked correct and went to the follow up questions. I answered those follow up questions as well. Recently I had given Amazon, LinkedIn phone interviews and got onsite calls from them( which I didn’t convert). I thought I did my Dropbox interview similar to how I did them. Less than 1 hour later I receieved email from my recruiter saying I’m not selected. I know it is subjective, but generally how do they evaluate the phone interviews? One thing I’m not sure of is: If the interviewee knew the question, what should he do? This is the only thing I can think of when it comes to this question. It was fairly a straightforward question. I was able to solve it fast the first time I saw it as well.
Recently same happened to me with Qualtrics. I knew the problem and hence was able to solve it. But got a reject.
DM Ed u
https://www.practicecodinginterview.com/blog/2019/5/20/the-coding-interview
For Dropbox phone screen, the first part is trivially easy, so I personally don’t care if you’ve seen it before. For the second part, you need to have a reasonably optimal solution (not just leetcode optimal but system design) and mostly working code. Did you just talk through the second part or did you actually write code for it?
I did not write the code, but gave the function and how can it be validated. But I did not code the entire path. Neither did the interviewer ask for a working or at least a pseudo code. And I had close to 20 minutes after finishing the first one(the interview started 10 mins late)
pretend to not know and perform well
That is the hope. I actually did not know that flavor of the question. It can be divided into 2 parts. I knew one part, but didn’t know the other. I was focusing on the part I did not know and trying to solve it. I gave the complete algorithm after I figured out the one I didn’t know. But even then if the algorithm and reasoning is correct, the interviewer should not reject it, right?
YOE? If you’re not new grad, then you’re expected to solve 2 parts of the question flawlessly + how to test your logic