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Posts tagged #interviews on Dynamo Geeks: 26 posts from the community, most useful first.

26 posts

Posts tagged #interviews

  1. Article

    Mock interview breakdown: she solved it and still got "no hire". Here is the scorecard.

    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:…

    Nikhil Sharan57likes11comments

  2. Question

    Is it okay to use ChatGPT for a take-home assignment in a grad data science interview?

    Hi everyone, I am finishing Master of Data Science and applying for grad roles. I got a take-home assignment from one company: analyse a customer churn dataset, build a model, write short report, 5 days. The instructions don't say anything about AI tools. I have question: Is it okay to use ChatGPT or Copilot to help? For example for pandas syntax, or to check the English in my report (my English is not native).…

    Zhang Xinyi 张欣怡14likes7comments

  3. Experience

    SEVENTH ROUND AND THEY HIRED INTERNALLY

    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…

    Rahul Deshmukh32likes11comments

  4. Question

    useEffect fetch running twice in my take-home test?? is my code broken

    doing a take-home for a junior role (round 2, we move 💪). simple React app that fetches a list of products. in the network tab i can see the request going out TWICE every time the page loads. i panicked and added a flag so it only fetches once, and now sometimes the list doesn't show at all, which is worse lol. here's the code: import { useEffect, useState } from 'react' let hasFetched = false export default…

    Jade Thompson9likes8comments

  6. Article

    System design primer: design a rate limiter, with real numbers

    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.…

    Nikhil Sharan64likes17comments

  8. Question

    CF Expert but bombed my first real interview. interviewer said 'communication'. what does that even mean for a coding round?

    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…

    Mahin Hasan9likes11comments

  9. Question

    latest row per customer without a correlated subquery that takes 40 minutes?

    doing a take-home for a data engineering role (job hunt day 187, grand, all grand). table is basically: customer_events ( id bigint primary key, customer_id bigint, event_type text, payload jsonb, created_at timestamptz ) about 120M rows in their description, i've a 5M sample locally. they want the latest event per customer. my first go: SELECT e.* FROM customer_events e WHERE e.created_at = ( SELECT MAX(created_at)…

    Aoife Brennan13likes10comments

  10. Article

    Salary negotiation scripts that worked for me and 11 juniors (copy paste allowed)

    Over the last two years I have helped 11 juniors negotiate their offers, plus my own. Results from my spreadsheet: average increase over the first offer was 14% , range 0% to 31%. Two people got nothing extra. Nobody got their offer pulled for asking. That last line is the one I want freshers to read twice. Here are the exact scripts. Change the numbers, keep the shape. Script 1: "What is your current and expected…

    Kunal Bhatia52likes16comments

  11. Article

    react + typescript interview questions from my last 11 rounds (and what they were actually testing)

    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…

    Sneha Kulkarni17likes10comments

  12. Article

    Read the constraints first: how I pick the pattern in under 2 minutes

    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…

    Nikhil Sharan111likes35comments

  13. Article

    Binary search on the answer: when nothing is sorted but you can still binary search

    Students learn binary search as "find x in a sorted array" and then get stuck on questions where nothing is sorted. The trick is that you are not searching the array. You are searching the answer . The problem You have packages with weights w[i] that must be shipped in order. A ship carries them over D days, loading packages in order each day until the next one would exceed its capacity. What is the minimum capacity…

    Nikhil Sharan40likes9comments

  14. Article

    DSA is not useless for real jobs. Grinding 800 questions without revision is.

    Every few weeks the same fight starts in my comments. One side says DSA is useless because "real jobs are CRUD". The other side says you are not an engineer if you cannot invert a binary tree on a whiteboard. Both sides are a little right and mostly loud. Let me give the boring answer with examples. Where DSA showed up in real work A nightly job deduplicating 2 million customer records with List.contains() inside a…

    Nikhil Sharan28likes19comments

  16. Article

    What I actually write in the interview feedback form (and what gets people rejected)

    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…

    Divya Ramanathan18likes7comments

  18. Experience

    Five months laid off. 431 applications. Here is the actual funnel.

    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…

    Kenji Tanabe29likes9comments

  19. Experience

    fiz minha primeira entrevista em inglês pra vaga gringa e travei no 'tell me about yourself'

    mano. eu me preparei 3 semanas. revisei system design, state management, teste de widget, até aquela pergunta de "how would you design an offline first app". tava confiante. aí entra o recruiter, super gente boa, de Austin, sorrisão. "so Thiago, tell me about yourself". e eu... travei. falei "I am working with Flutter since 2020" e depois esqueci como fala fintech em inglês. É FINTECH. É A MESMA PALAVRA kkkkkk a…

    Thiago Valadares8likes8comments

  22. Article

    Monotonic stack, explained with a queue at a chai stall

    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…

    Nikhil Sharan37likes8comments

  23. Experience

    Offer rescinded 6 days before joining. After I had already served my notice.

    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:…

    Kunal Bhatia29likes9comments

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