The most useful posts in this topic, by likes from the community.
Most people read the story in a problem and skip the constraints. The story is decoration. The constraints tell you the complexity you are allowed, and the complexity tells you the pattern. This is the routine I use, and the one I have been teaching in mocks for six years. Step 1: constraints → your budget Rough rule: a judge does about 10^8 simple operations per second in C++ or Java. So: n ≤ 20 : exponential is…
Most rate limiter answers I hear in mocks are one box on a diagram labelled "rate limiter" and then the candidate moves on. That box is the whole question. Let us do it properly, with numbers. Thanks to Kenji for reviewing the draft. 1. Requirements (spend 5 minutes here) Public API behind a gateway. 10 million daily active users. Limit: 100 requests per user per minute. Some endpoints (login, OTP) much stricter.…
Kunal and I have been doing free mock interviews on weekends this month. One of them taught me more than the others, so with the candidate's permission (and details changed) here is the full breakdown. She solved the problem. Her code was correct. In a real loop she would have got a "lean no hire". Let us see why. The question type A merge intervals variant. Medium difficulty. Nothing exotic. Minute by minute 0-3:…
Problem: for every element in an array, find the first element to its right that is greater than it. If none, -1. Brute force: for each i, scan right until you find something bigger. O(n²). With n = 10^5 you are done for. The chai stall Imagine people standing in a line outside a chai stall, all looking to the right. Each person wants to know: who is the first person to my right who is taller than me? Walk along the…
ok. deep breath. let me write this properly. SDET role at a Pune product company. not my old company, a different one, good reviews, good team. i was so careful with this one. here is the loop: HR screen online test (java + SQL) automation framework design: playwright, API testing, how i'd structure test data, CI integration live DSA, two mediums hiring manager round director "culture fit" round "one final chat with…
I was laid off in February after nine years at a large tech company. I've kept a spreadsheet since day one, partly because I'm an engineer and partly because counting things is how I stay sane. People keep asking what the market actually looks like for a senior backend engineer right now, so here are the real numbers, February through July. The funnel Cold applications (career pages, job boards): 431. Any human…
This happened three years ago and I still have the email saved in a folder called "never again". I was at a service company. Got an offer from a mid-size SaaS product company, 75% hike, my first product role. I negotiated my 90-day notice down to 60 with a partial buyout, served it, did the handover, had the farewell cake, collected the "all the best" emails. Six days before my joining date, at 7:40 pm, an email:…
Candidates almost never see what happens after the interview. I've been a hiring manager for six years and have filled in some hundreds of these forms, so here is what is actually on it and what I write. The form Ours has five fields, and most companies I know use something similar: Problem solving Coding Communication Ownership and attitude (with a specific example required) Overall: Strong No / No / Yes / Strong…
day 22 of the hunt. 11 rounds at 6 companies so far: 4 machine coding, 3 DSA (easy to medium), 2 frontend system design, 2 behavioural. here's what came up in the frontend rounds, and what i think each question was really testing. 1. "why does this effect run twice?" react 18 strict mode runs effects twice in development, on purpose, to catch effects that don't clean up after themselves. they are testing whether you…
Final round today. The interviewer was on his phone for about 20 of our 45 minutes. I designed a rate limiter for someone reading Slack. I said thank you at the end. I'm not sure who I was thanking. 🙃
Yesterday I created this topic. Today I am writing the story that is the reason it exists. It is 1 am and I am still a little angry about it, two years later. Series B fintech. Recruiter call went well. Then the take-home arrived: "should take 4 to 6 hours". The brief: A payments reconciliation service with a REST API Unit and integration tests Dockerfile and docker-compose A README with design decisions "Bonus: a…
ok so. codeforces expert (1680), ICPC regionals twice. first internship interview yesterday, dhaka product company, panel was remote from singapore. problem was a medium graph thing. had the idea in 2 min, coded it in 8, passed all their cases. feedback today: "strong problem solving, weak communication, no hire." bro WHAT. i solved it. faster than anyone they've probably seen. what do they want, a ted talk? also…
