Original post: Link
About me: BE in Tier 2 college with 7+ years of experience, currently working as Senior Software engineer in a non-FAANG mid-sized company in Bangalore.
Preparation: My journey for a job change was motivated by a desire to increase the compensation and started in Oct 2020. Since I liked the work in my current company, I was in no hurry to change the job and wanted to go slow in my preparation. I relied solely on Leetcode for DSA questions and lots of YouTube videos, online articles, GTSD for system design. For behavioral questions, I went through the core values of the company I was interviewing for and prepared stories around the same.
I started giving interviews around May 2021
LC count: : ~600 [30% easy, 50% medium, 20% hard]
Contest rating: : 1793
With that, let me begin my interview journey.
Vmware | Bangalore
Recruiter reached out on LinkedIn for an open position
Phone screen
https://leetcode.com/problems/min-stack/
https://leetcode.com/problems/score-of-parentheses/
Technical round 1
Design memory management subsystem
Technical round 2
Questions on projects in resume
https://leetcode.com/problems/reverse-nodes-in-k-group/
Technical round 3
Variation of LCA of binary tree
Discussion on software upgrades for servers in a distributed system
Hiring manager round
Standard behavioral questions
Result
Declined offer - Compensation offered was lower than my current salary
Nutanix | Bangalore
Recruiter reached out in LinkedIn for an open position
Phone screen
OS concepts
Easy to medium variation of regular expression matching
Technical round 1
Questions on projects in resume
https://leetcode.com/problems/max-area-of-island/
System design similar to pastebin
Technical round 2
Questions on projects in resume
Low level design - Design parking lot
Technical round 3
Design APIs for leaderboard system
update -> update the score of given users
getRank -> Get the rank of given user
top10 -> Return top 10 users based on rank
System design for online coding platform
Hiring manager round
Standard behavioral questions
Result
Declined offer - Offer was good but I did not like the role
Twilio | Bangalore
OA
Standard 2 questions that can be found online - one sliding window and one rest API related
Bar raiser
Standard LP questions on past experiences
Questions on projects in resume
System design
Questions on projects in resume
Some long document was shared which had the requirement to design a system for their internal application. I used the format in GTSD and went over all the aspects of the design
Coding round
TreeMap related question [LC easy]
Questions on message queue, Database etc
Hiring manager
Standard behavioral questions
Result
Declined offer - Was offered L3 but I wanted L4 [Not to be confused with levels at Google]
Amazon | SDE2 | Bangalore
Recruiter reached out on LinkedIn for an open position.
Phone screen
https://leetcode.com/problems/next-greater-element-ii/
https://leetcode.com/problems/sliding-window-maximum/
They took a month to schedule the onsite after the phone screen.
Technical round 1
Standard LP questions
https://leetcode.com/problems/construct-binary-tree-from-preorder-and-inorder-traversal/
Technical round 2
Standard LP questions
Variation of https://leetcode.com/problems/k-closest-points-to-origin/
System design
LP questions
Design mail server
Result
Got a standard rejection mail after 3 weeks of onsite
Google | L4 | Bangalore
Applied through a referral
Phone screen
Variation of islands problem involving DFS
I had 3 coding rounds and 1 googlyness, was not aware that this would be for cloud org when I gave the interviews. I came to know later from a post in LC that (3 + 1) rounds is for cloud org.
Coding round 1
Made up question requiring bactracking to solve [LC medium]
Completed the coding on time
Coding round 2
1 warm up question [LC easy]
Made up question requiring Trie data structure to solve [LC medium]
Completed coding for both the questions
Coding round 3
Vague question requiring geometry and BFS to solve [LC medium / hard]
Told the approach and the interviewer agreed but ran out of time to fully complete the code
Googlyness
Standard behavioral questions
Result:
Recruiter reached out after a week stating the feedback is positive and my packet would be going to hiring committee. I was introduced to 3-4 cloud teams for team matching in the meantime and I expressed interest in one of them.
After 1.5 months, hiring committee decided to offer me an L3 position since I could not complete the code in round 3. I wanted to reject straightaway but decided to get the comp letter for my efforts and rejected a day after getting the comp letter (Of course the comp offered was lesser than my current salary). They still think people would join for the brand irrespective of the level/comp but that seems to be changing now with many people rejecting the offer.
Bloomberg | London
I applied online and recruiter reached out within a week.
Phone screen
Top k related question requiring heap to solve
String to integer
Coding round
I was asked to implement browser history which I did using double linked list and heap. The interviewers were not happy with custom implementation of linked hash map, they wanted me to use inbuilt functions since that is what would be done in production code.
System design
Design question around their internal systems
Result
Got rejection mail within 30 minutes of the 2 rounds. I had a sync up with the recruiter a week later and they gave detailed feedback that my coding round did not go well since I used custom implementation instead of library functions. Recruiter encouraged me to apply back after 6 months.
Airbnb | Bangalore
Recruiter reached out stating my profile is a good match. I completed the OA within 2 days of sharing the same.
OA
2 Medium questions - one binary search related and one tree related
After 2 weeks of OA, my technical rounds were scheduled. For coding rounds, the expectation is to run the code and make sure it passes the test cases that interviewer has.
Coding round 1
https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/352704/Airbnb-or-Iterator-over-List-of-Lists
Coding round 2
Given list of tags of the form {key, value} and a sentence, replace all occurrences of key in sentence with the value.
Experience round
Discussion on project, measuring the impact of project, processes for delivering project etc
System design
Design chat application system
After 2 weeks of no-update from recruiter, I decided to check and sent a mail asking for the status. The recruiter responded after a week saying I have to give culture fit rounds and it was scheduled after 2 weeks.
2 Culture fit rounds
Behavioral questions based on their mission and core values
Again, weeks of silence. I finally decided to ask after waiting for 3 weeks and they scheduled a call with some HR lead for 30 minutes. The lead explained the org structure and the teams they had in Bangalore and asked my salary details. After this, I was asked to share my compensation and competing offers. A couple of weeks later I asked for status but no response from recruiter and I never bothered to ask again.
Result:: : Ghosted
Painfully slow process it took 3 months just to complete all the rounds. I think the recruiters are of the opinion that candidates will follow up since they need job which is worse. I am hoping the recruiter will come back one day and it would be my turn to keep them waiting and finally ghost :)
Grab | Bangalore
Recruiter reached out for an open position.
OA - One medium heap based and one hard graph question
Coding round 1 [LLD]
Producer Consumer problem
LRU cache
Coding round 2
Variation of merge accounts
Diameter of binary tree
System design
Design web crawler
Hiring Manager round
System design for some payment use case
Result
Declined offer - Compensation was below my expectations
Microsoft | Bangalore
Recruiter reached out for a hiring event
Technical round 1
Questions on projects in resume
Coding question on regular expression matching
Technical round 2
Questions on projects in resume
Sort large number of integers stored in a file on a system with limited RAM
Technical round 3
System design - Video streaming service
Hiring manager round
Standard Behavioral questions
System design - Version control system
Result
Declined Offer - Was offered L62 and I asked for L63 which was not accepted.
Facebook | E5 | London
Applied through a referral
Phone screen
LC medium question to be solved using stack
LC easy recursion-based question
After I made it to onsite, I took LC premium for a month to focus on FB tagged questions.
Product Design
Standard design question from Grking with focus on APIs and user experience.
Coding 1
LC medium related to palindromic strings [LC tagged]
LC medium involving Math and HashMap to solve [non-LC]
Coding 2
LC medium related to trees [LC tagged]
LC hard involving heap to solve [LC tagged]
Behavioral
Standard behavioral questions centered around projects, conflict resolution and feedbacks
Result
Accepted offer - Got the verbal offer within 3 days of interviews.
Few others - Got offer from Sibros, rejected in phone screen rounds of Rubrik, Yugabyte and I did not attempt the take home assignment from Rippling
My final thoughts: Never compromise on the role/compensation offered. Believe in yourself that you will ultimately get what you want, just have to wait for the right opportunity. Keep practicing and all the best to every one of you :)
No comments:
Post a Comment