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Google | LinkedIn | Microsoft | Walmart | Startup

Author
  • Shared Anonymously

Education: BE CS [Last Tier College in India]
Experience: 3+
Location: India
Timeline: 2 months in 2024
Position: SE2 (or equivalent)

Disclaimer
The purpose of this post is not to disclose the exact questions but to help others keep informed about what are the recent trends in interviews at the aforementioned companies. By recent trends, I mean level of difficulty of questions, topics, and popularity.

Giving away exact questions would be an unfair thing

  • For interviewers who have to spend time to find and prepare questions to do a sound technical assessment of the interviewee's skills in a very limited period of time.
  • For those who work hard to prepare for the interviews and those who don't pass by this post. The ones getting the questions by this post may have an unfair advantage over others as mentioned.

Google [Recruiter reached out based on past engagement; this was my 3rd interview loop with Google]

  • Phone Screen [DSA]: Implement rate limiter (HashMap, LC Easy to Medium)
  • Round 1 [DSA]: Implement a novel data structure for insert, search, delete operations with certain criteria. (Queue, LC Medium)
  • Round 2 [DSA]: Discrete mathematics (Arithmetic Progression) + Array [LC Medium to Hard]
  • Round 3 [DSA]: Simple Disjoint Set based problem [LC Medium, Hard if you don't know Disjoint Set optimisations]
  • Round 4 [Googleyness]: Questions on scenarios prevalent in US or other countries but not so common in India (Hard)

LinkedIn [Applied on LinkedIn and sent a DM to recruiter]:

  • Phone Screen [DSA]: Engineering viva questions on OS, CN, Scalability, one coding question on 2 pointer and modified binary search (LC Medium)
  • Round 1 [DSA]: 2 coding problems, LC Medium, 1st on Geometry, 2nd on BFS
  • Round 2 [DSA]: 2 coding problems, LC Medium, 1st on 2D Geometry, 2nd on DFS
  • Round 3 [Concurrency]: Engineering viva questions on OS. For coding - In Java, there are multiple types of ThreadPoolExecutor. I was asked to give an implemention of one of them. Basically, I wasn't allowed to use the API but rather implement the API to produce the same behavior. [Medium]
  • Round 4 [Design]: Design a system similar to SignalFx/Splunk.
  • Round 5 [Host Manager]: Technical and Behavioral questions on past experiences, extension of the design problem from previous round

Microsoft [Recruiter reached out on LinkedIn]

  • OA [DSA]: 2 coding problems, LC easy to medium, 1st on DFS, 2nd on Variable size sliding window (Solved both in 15 mins, but there was a platform problem which is why 1st's submission wasn't being accepted, wrote about it to recruiter in email)
  • Round 1 [DSA]: Discrete Methematics (Statistics, LC Hard), Stack + BFS (LC Medium) - Implemented sub optimally 1st, gave optimal approach to 2nd
  • Round 2 [Design]: Design extensions. Focus was on APIs, interservice communication, security measures and constructs
  • Round 3 [Design]: Design DB snapshot system with in-memory operations having strict time and space complexity for insert, lookup, update operations
  • Note: What I realised from Microsoft's design rounds is that they don't ask generic distributed system questions wherein you can throw random components out of Alex Xu's posts/books. They ask questions where scalability is not a challenge but even to implement the functionality in one single machine is difficult. If you are not getting what I am saying, just try to solve the Round 3 question.

Walmart [Former colleague referred me]:

  • Round 1 [DSA]: Tree traversal (LC Easy), 2 LC Medium DP problems (straight out of college textbooks)
  • Round 2 [Domain]: Engineering viva questions on Spring Boot, REST, Java
  • Round 3 [HM]: Technical questions on Database internals, Kernel internals, Behavioral questions

Fintech Startup, Black color logo, Bengaluru based [Not naming as they don't interview many and do not wish to lose anonymity; applied on LinkedIn]

  • Round 1 [DSA]: Recursion + DP (LC Medium), open ended question on encryption, hashing, random ID generation
  • Result: Ghosted

My interview experiences of 2023: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/4559267/PYPL-or-AMZN-or-Groww-or-PhonePe-or-Paytm-or-Cloudera-or-Zomato-or-Wayfair-or-Nutanix-or-Startup

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