Companies not asking LC style questions in phone screens

Mar 10 13 Comments

Is this becoming a trend?

So I worked at a MANGA previously (for only 11 months, had 2 years of experience before that), took a gap year, and now I'm back on the job market.

I had interviews phone screens with Reddit and Uber, and the questions were more design oriented. Basically, without going too much into details, it was implementing a certain type of distributed cache and implementing something language internal, related to the garbage collection.

Obviously, parts of the questions were LC related, like implementing a simple cache and some graph algos for GC, but most of it was a design discussion, going into distributed systems/OS internals/concurrency etc.

Is this becoming a new norm? I failed both screens, didn't get much feedback. Was I supposed to implement the whole problem, for example for distributed cache that expires entries, is it reasonable to expect implementation of the whole thing - with sharding, concurrent expiring mechanism and everything, spinning up a bunch of threads, and have a working local solution?

Kinda feeling depressed after all of this, I guess I'm destined to be flipping burgers at McDonalds soon. Life sucks.

TC: 0k
YoE: 3

comments

Want to comment? LOG IN or SIGN UP
TOP 13 Comments
  • Soon we'll all be required to stand up a fully functional social network from scratch and demonstrate its ability to handle 100 million users in an hour.
    Mar 10 0
  • That's actually a good sign that industry realizes LC performance != solid engineering.

    To your original question. I don't think it's expected to implement the whole thing. More of an open-ended questions to see a thinking process and your fluency with tech concepts.

    I had a similar exp in the main loop, where 3 out 4 sessions were about design and writing some basic code with multithreading. Kinda enjoyed it tbh.
    Mar 10 4
    • Google
      dental

      Go to company page Google

      dental
      How relevant is this vs the grokking system design type of stuff. All this + LC grind is a tall order
      Mar 10
    • New
      cicamica

      New

      cicamica
      @prot thanks for the recommendations - much appreciated! :D
      Mar 10
  • New / Eng
    blindstuff

    New Eng

    PRE
    Labelbox
    blindstuff
    For front-end/ full stack roles at start-up to mid-size companies, i can confirm that yes this is becoming a trend. I have seen this shift recently.

    Examples: databricks, bolt, robinhood, airtable
    Mar 10 3
  • Never heard of this. Implementing a distributed cache at a phone screen? What kind of role did you apply to?
    Mar 10 1
  • Time to launch oscode, dbcode, networkcode as a competitor to leetcode. Soon there will be hard questions about abstract syntax trees, os algorithms, db query optimizers etc. This will be much more harder than leetcode which used to have a limited set of topics
    Mar 10 0