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How to be content in life?
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Had my onsite L5 loop yesterday. I don't think the questions were super hard. Round 1 system design: Started off great. But I feel I was a little vague with respect to a lot of the details towards the end, like, being vague about requiring more than one worker to get a job done, unsure of rtt in lan, etc. (Could be leaning hire at best or LNH :( ) Round 2 coding: got a medium, string related question. I explained an Algo but made a mistake when coding it. Was able to figure out the issue when dry running and fixed it. I mentioned in the beginning that I'll get to handling edge cases later if I had time, but I couldn't.(could be LH again) Round 3 behavioral: was alright. For almost all questions, I was asked what my learning was and how I would've done things differently. I couldn't rate my answers for these, but I don't think I was negative anywhere. (LH?) Round 4 coding: hard dp question. Solved using brute force because the interviewer suggested coding it as I couldn't optimize it earlier. Came up with a more optimal solution after dry running the brute force solution, but could not explain properly, though I was on the right track. Was able to partially code and ran out of time. This partial code could be wrong as I didn't have time to check if it was doing what I wanted it to do. (LH?) Round 5 coding: a medium question, that I could code up quickly. Had a follow up, was able to explain the solution and coded it, but didn't have time to dry run. (H?) I'm sure, my design round already costed me any chance I had at L5. Would this performance at least meet the L4 bar? System design was with a very senior engineer, if he says no hire, is it possible I could be down leveled to L3? Or is it more likely to be a reject? Based on recent posts, I think I'll have to wait for a few weeks to get feedback from recruiter. What do think my chances are? Edit: I'm getting good comments explaining why this could be a reject. Folks who are voting L4, are you just trying to be nice, lol? Please do comment why you picked your option, if you don't mind. Thanks! Update: should provide 2 extra coding rounds Update: cleared HC, matched with a team I liked and accepted the offer, I'm happy :) TC: walnuts YOE: 6+ #google #onsite #interview
Those LH look more like LNH or NH to me. There are no strong signals for hiring. Unlikely to get any offer tbh. L3s perform better than this at coding based on my experience.
Thanks for the insight :) I hope that there's no strong hire-signals only on my post (because I've mostly shared the negatives from my experience, as I'm looking for the worst case expectation) and I've actually demonstrated some good signals as well 🤞
Possible. I'm viewing this from the perspective of interviewers/HC. If the raw feedback written by interviewers is similar to what you wrote, it's mostly looking like NHs. I've seen L3s get rejected with such feedback on coding. L4 and L5 have much higher expectations. Code quality and clarity is also very important at these levels. Easy problems are trickier than hard problems tbh since the interviewer is probably expecting production quality code in that case. Some interviewers tend to value coding more than algorithm knowledge which is why they ask easier problems (at least on the surface).
Were the coding questions of known patterns or totally new?
Nothing was totally out of the box. With decent practice, one can easily ace the interview.
We don’t do L-2 down levels. It’s always L-1 in the worst case scenario.
L4 downlevel
If system design is LH then L5 is not possible. And your coding rounds doesn't seem to go really well. LH can be NH. Sometimes in Google even if you solve the problem you will get an NH.
Yes, only one coding round went pretty good, one was okay and the last one was incomplete. I guess I should prepare for a rejection :/
I think its a reject tbh.
Wait, which position you are applying? Is it in an infrastructure team? As you need to know RTT in LAN, which I don’t think necessary for sde.
Swe! You need to know an approximate range and shouldn't be off by many orders of magnitude. Your design depends on these assumptions. Ex: If one worker needs to interact with x number of hosts with some SLA for latency, the rtt could determine if one worker is sufficient or if you need to parallelize this.
Couldn’t you do vertical scaling on workers as well? Would you cache anything to reduce repeated computations? Maybe have workers in centers closer to the origin of the request to reduce distance traveled?
Google HC reminds me of the strict teachers that only appreciate answers that are by the book. If you are not going deep into the solution, you'll not pass. Work with your interviewer to clearly define the problem (and things you'll not solve during the interview) and go deep on the scoped problem. I kept my designs at high level and covered various cases. Rejected 🙂 A miscommunication from interviewer made me solve a different problem. Rejected 🙂 I did get offers from other companies without much prep. My Google recruiter also told me that reviews written by my interviewers are good. But I was way overconfident for Google HC. I can say I wouldn't clear without serious prep and tremendous luck.
G hires a lot recently so down level is possible