As I mentioned last week; I interviewed with Netflix and Palantir. What I didn’t mention was that I actually took them the same day (3hr final rounds each) and.. I was expecting to get rejected from Netflix, and potentially accepted for Palantir. Interestingly enough, I got rejected for Palantir, and just got news today from Netflix that I’ll be moving onto the team matching + speaking with the hiring manager rounds!!

Social media is a very odd thing nowadays. When I got an offer from Zoom, I saw that a hiring manager looked at my profile on LinkedIn. This time around, I got two searches from a hiring manager on Netflix at my profile, and was hoping for good news – but the recruiter hadn’t reached back out to me for about a week, so I had thought I got ghosted. Luckily for me – I passed, he actually told me I did exceptionally well on the interviews :).

Hopefully it pans out, but if not – totally okay. Anywhere else is better than Intel! Had some more finals with Workday + TikTok, and a phone screen with Bloomberg this week. All the practice is paying off – although the burnout from Leetcode is dropping in crazy hard. I have low to zero motivation for any leetcoding at this point!!

I missed the offer I truly desired – Meta. I did all this prep and ended up not getting an offer – no surprise really to me. Not sure if it was cause of the last coding round, where the interviewer described the problem for about ~15 minutes and didn’t give me plenty of time to solve the problem itself.. or something else, since Meta doesn’t give feedback about their interviews.

BUT, I suppose it doesn’t matter too much! I’m feeling good – I received 2 others offers after last week. I already denied one, since the pay was lower than my current pay, but the other 2 are great so far! Not only that, but I interviewed with Palantir and Netflix this past Friday. I should know the results soon, but man.. if I get lucky enough to get into Netflix, I’m done leetcoding for the rest of my life!

~ only luck will guide me further

I can happilly say that the LC grind is coming towards its end! Of the interviews from last week, I have received one offer from Zoom! I am definitely going to get one from VISA Inc eventually – I’m 100% confident I aced those. I will potentially get one from Workday and CRISPR as well!

I finished my final onsite for Meta today; which was a question I was absolutely not expecting at all – not so much a LC question, and received some more invites for more interviews upcoming. I never would’ve thought that the mediocre developer that I am, is getting so many itnerview invites. I received some more invites for Microsoft, Netflix, TikTok, and more! I’m excited, my LC practice is paying off; and I have something to fall back upon. My confidence in these interviews are starting to skyrocket, and I am confident I can get some more offers in the bag!!

Coming from the perspective of someone who received so many rejections and ghosts from my initial job search as a ChemE searching for Process engineering roles – this is fucking amazing. SWEs have it super nice, and CS is definitely it!!

Alright – I didn’t get to my Meta interviews just yet.. but, it’s time to start writing as it’s long overdue.

So far, I’ve had 12 interviews in the past 3 days, and there are 10 more to go in the upcoming week. I do not want to hear anyone say “tell me about yourself”, ever again – but I know I will many many more times to come. I’m tired, i’m over it – but unfortunately I haven’t received any offers yet, so I must keep going. The nice things are – I’m getting more and more requests to interview every single day! I’m getting far more comfortable with behavioral questions and I’m getting way more comfortable with saying my thoughts out loud during coding interviews.

And… I also now need to start considering.. for some of these companies – the tech facilities are sweet, they offer free food – lunch/dinner, free gym, and free barber cuts!! I never even would’ve imagined that was a thing… but I still think being fully remote would be better. It is a shame that being fully remote wouldn’t allow for things like that though.

Somehow, despite failing to answer either of the Meta phone screen’s 2nd questions; I’ve been able to successfully make it through and get onto the onsites! Took this interview yesterday, and got word I am moving on!

The leetcode struggle never ends!

1st question I got – fucking easy; retrieve the maximum value at each level of a binary tree. Either do a DFS or a BFS, and store the values in a dictionary and compare them to the value at the level. OR do a DFS and simply store in an array with some variable that tracks the level you’re at and what levels were previously looked at. This one is cake – only thing I got mixed up on here, was not asking if negative values would be present in the binary tree; which was simply fixed up by updating my .get() method to have a -infinity value instead of -1.

2nd question, disgusting – not on Leetcode FB tagged top 50 or top 100; it was one the interviewer chose themselves; imagine you’re receiving a constant stream of characters, as you receive them; determine how you’d print a specific list of words when they pop up! i.e. if opabobafett was part of our stream; and the words we’d want to print out are in the list [opa, boba, bobafett], print those specific words out. As we can see in the example stream, there are overlapping characters, so…. it makes it a little complex. I didn’t get to code this one out AT ALL, I simply described my thought process and how I’d even go abotu doing it. Luckily, I know of tries! So I said each word should be stored within a TrieNode, and the end of the word should be identified in some manner. To determine that the word is ready to be printed, we store a list of pointers. Each character that we receive, we check if it’s in the root TrieNode, and if any of the pointers in our list can be moved forward. We remove each pointer as we print it out, so we don’t constantly waste storage! Luckily the interviewer was convinced enough, although tbh I barely know the implementation of a Trie!

Onwards to the next 3-4 rounds! These are not my only interviews, anymore.. but.. still my most desired! Amazon, Microsoft, Zoom, anywhere, take me in!

Hi all,

I just completed my Meta phone screen today – the scariest 45 minutes of my life. Leading up to it – I had about ~2-3 wks of prep time. I took the advice of people on teamblind, whom simply just suggested to do FB tagged problems on Leetcode. They weren’t completely wrong – as the problems I received were similar – but not exactly the same.

1st question – probably an LC easy or medium? More towards easy IMO. Traverse through a binary search tree and return the average of nodes that fall in between a range of integers: low + high. Simple enough; I was able to solve this one and explain my thought process. Simply traverse through the tree and check if the value is in my range, if so – add it to my running sum, and increment my counter. I missed a few edge cases, but was able to resolve them with some tips from the interviewer. Not a problem on the FB tagged top 50 or 100, but no biggie, fairly simple problem.

2nd question – LC hard; I didn’t remember doing this problem on LC, but I remembered doing something similar. The prompt was.. given a string of integers, let’s say… 12345, return all possible combos with + and – that give a certain target, let’s say 100. So.. something like 1 + 23 + 4 – 5 was possible to return the possible solution. I explained that I’d take a DFS approach to this problem, but wasn’t able to explain the potential time complexity, nor was I was clearly able to mention how I’d go about doing the DFS. If I had more time, I could’ve gone through and coded this up fully, I think.

45 minutes is a short time period for 2 problems from LC.. I think I flunked it – but… at the very least – I’M FREE! These past 2-3 weeks were the busiest and most stressful weeks of my life, but I can at least say I tried my hardest to succeed, even if I failed.

Anyway, on to more LC so I don’t have to struggle like this again for other opportunities 🙂

Hi all,

As many of us are entering the CS467 course and potentially the last stages of this CS degree [yay for 2nd bachelors], we have all either already landed a tech job – or are still searching. While I already have a SW job at Intel, I see no reason to not continue searching and potentially grabbing a better opportunity elsewhere!

Some of us are interested in MANGA, UNICORNs, HFTs, etc. It doesn’t really matter where we’re interested in going at this point – we all have one thing in common. All of us will be doing leetcode for the rest of our lives, we will be in an endless cycle of reading about how to do the O(logN) solution, where we can somehow only come up with the bruteforce solution leading to the least optimal O(N^2) solution. Reading about how some genius managed to write your solution in one line, instead of the ~20-40 lines of code you wrote! 🙂

I’m currently undergoing the search for a new grad software development role, and will likely blog about my progress, learnings and failures for online assessments (OA) and interviews!

Thanks,

Freddy