41–50 of 136 posts
To reiterate: Ignore all study materials. Go to leetcode.com and literally memorize the most common questions for the company you are interviewing at. This is what your competition is doing. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. Just memorize it Do the same thing for system design. Memorize the answers word for word. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. The highest paid tech jobs go to candidates that regurgitate perfect answers to inter…
To reiterate: Ignore all study materials. Go to leetcode.com and literally memorize the most common questions for the company you are interviewing at. This is what your competition is doing. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. Just memorize it Do the same thing for system design. Memorize the answers word for word. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. The highest paid tech jobs go to candidates that regurgitate perfect answers to inter…
To reiterate: Ignore all study materials. Go to leetcode.com and literally memorize the most common questions for the company you are interviewing at. This is what your competition is doing. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. Just memorize it Do the same thing for system design. Memorize the answers word for word. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. The highest paid tech jobs go to candidates that regurgitate perfect answers to inter…
To reiterate: Ignore all study materials. Go to leetcode.com and literally memorize the most common questions for the company you are interviewing at. This is what your competition is doing. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. Just memorize it Do the same thing for system design. Memorize the answers word for word. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. The highest paid tech jobs go to candidates that regurgitate perfect answers to inter…
Do note that these interview slates will vary depending on level of candidate experience. At Google, we generally do not ask system design interviews of new grads / entry-level candidates. It's pretty rare for mid-level candidates (L4), and expected for senior and up (L5+). Also, there are situations where candidates may have an extra interview added to their slate. One common reason for this: the hiring committee do…
> One common reason for this: the hiring committee doesn't have enough signal because the interviewers don't coordinate appropriately, and end up asking heavily overlapping questions (e.g. 3 questions that basically reduce to "use DFS"). I'm curious - how much up-front coordination is mandated? Plenty of the interview loops I've done agree in advance to the exact set of questions we'll ask during an onsite specifical…
For anyone in hiring, for new grads how important are internships ? Seems like its practically required at this point
I am not going to reject a qualified student out of hand for not having done an internship.
For anyone in hiring, for new grads how important are internships ? Seems like its practically required at this point
That is, when hiring a new grad for an L3 spot or whatever, assuming they met the bar for the interview and in fact did an interview, first we look at interview performance, then internships (with an internship at our company with a successful outcome being the best), then school, then recommendations from current employees. Typically someone needs to have a good interview and one or more of the other things, more if less good at interview, potentially only one if outstanding at interview.
Horrible. I’ve been doing software engineering for 12+ years and I’ve never had to pass leetcode questions. I have worked for 5 companies in total, and I think I have been in around 15-20 tech interviews in total as well. The interviews I passed didn’t ask me leetcode questions (I had to do take home assignments and system design). In my last interview they finally stop asking coding questions (staff position). No Fa…
> For the technical interview, visit leetcode.com and do practice questions at a medium/hard difficulty in Algorithm, Data Structures, and Object-Oriented categories to help prepare.
I guess for some of us there is no escaping leetcode.
To reiterate: Ignore all study materials. Go to leetcode.com and literally memorize the most common questions for the company you are interviewing at. This is what your competition is doing. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. Just memorize it Do the same thing for system design. Memorize the answers word for word. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. The highest paid tech jobs go to candidates that regurgitate perfect answers to inter…
Don't memorize it, learn it, become good at it.
No matter how much you memorize, there's going to be something you don't. But I think you know that.
To reiterate: Ignore all study materials. Go to leetcode.com and literally memorize the most common questions for the company you are interviewing at. This is what your competition is doing. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. Just memorize it Do the same thing for system design. Memorize the answers word for word. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. The highest paid tech jobs go to candidates that regurgitate perfect answers to inter…
• What is an SSL certificate? Follow up question: What is inside them?
• How would you go about designing a modern NTP to sync a fleet of local-first systems?
• Do you see a security problem with this code? If yes, what is it and how would you fix it?
• Same question as above but with twelve different pieces of code, each one more complicated than the previous one.
• What would you consider Personal Identifying Information (PII) in a food delivery app?
• Explain XSS, SQL, XSRF…
• Hashing vs. Encryption
• How to protect customers from phishing attacks?
• Say you discover a data leak, for example, a backup in a public S3 bucket. Communicate leak or not? If yes, who will you communicate with? How will you communicate?
• Improve event processing logic and performance of the following Java application. Our company revolves around processing events, quickly. Implement the alarm system to monitor incoming events for any delays in processing events by other event processors. (If you find it surprising that Apple uses Java, I share that sentiment. Interestingly, I opted for Go instead of Java to solve the problem during the interview, and the interviewers were pleased to explore a new programming language. I believe this aspect earned me some additional points.)
• Design a table booking system for a restaurant (database, API endpoints, etc.)
• A continuous integration (CI) build step fails (in tests), what do you do?
• What is your ideal Developer→Customer feedback loop? Realistically, what would a bad one look like?
• How would you design macOS Photos.app? (The best part of the interview was a discussion about what to do with content that is out of view and the performance implications of different solutions.)
• Third-party company wants Apple’s data to show ads. What do you do? (The obvious answer is you don’t give the raw data to them, but if you have to, how do you anonymize it?)
• so on and so forth.
There was this interviewer who appeared to be commited to ask me one hundred questions in the span of an hour, and while I didn’t count, I think we got pretty close to a hundred. The questions started at an easy level, for example, what is HTML, and increased in complexity every five minutes or so. Fortunately, I realize what type of interview this was and proceeded to give very one-sentence answers, sometimes just 2-3 words before jumping to the next question. One of the funniest, craziest, most exhausting, but somehow rewarding interviews I have ever had in my whole career. At times I thought the interviewer was some sort of artificial intelligence and the webcam was fake. Later, I met the interviewer in person and we became friends.
Now, having become an insider, I can attest that it’s acceptable to some extent to memorize responses for coding exercises and rehearse answers for behavioral questions. As you rightly point out, many other candidates engage in these practices as well. However, if a candidate’s proficiency is limited to merely regurgitating code without a genuine understanding and, consequently, an ability to articulate the underlying concepts in both the programming and behavioral interviews, that candidate is likely to face failure.
Before landing the job at Apple, I was also in the interview process for a position at Microsoft. The nature of the work appeared to be significantly more fulfilling than what I currently have. The level of technical expertise required during the interviews was remarkable, with the two medium and hard level LeetCode-style questions being the relatively easier segment. Memorizing answers was technically impossible based on the interviewing style. I would have unquestionably accepted that job if it weren’t for the fact that I needed additional income to continue providing for my extended family and covering my mortgage.
In conclusion, if you decide to memorize LeetCode problems, ensure that you also grasp the underlying concepts. Unless all your interviewers are gullible, it will become quite apparent if you're just mechanically writing code without a genuine understanding of the problem or the interview's objectives.