面的是Zurich的职位
第一面 A guy from an indian number calls me at the phone, the interview starts. He asks me directly the excercise, without introduction.
The excercise was : https://leetcode.com/problems/queue-reconstruction-by-height/
I am able to solve it pretty well, there were a few mistakes but he didn’t mind to much about that.
Second question: How would you implement Google autosuggest?
(For those who don’t know, Google autosuggest are the words/sentences that are autosuggested by google when you search something and write the first letters.)
It took me a lot to understand the question, his english was not good and sometimes I had to ask him to write down what he was saying. The problem was, this question was a sort of System Design question and I was not supposed to know System Design at my Level.
I said that a good solution, after some thinking, was to use a Trie and a HashMap. The real good solution, as I figured out after the interview, was to use a Trie and a Heap. He was very disappointed at the end because I didn’t get the right answer.
After two days, the recruiter told me I did not pass the interview, and invited me to a video call to discuss about my interview experience. There, we discussed the intervew and I told her that honestly the experience I had was terrible: the guy was not able to speak english and asked me about system design. She answered that sometimes interviewers don’t know or forget about your level and ask you wrong questions and offered me the opportunity to repeat the interview.
第二面 This time, a nice and clearly speaking guy calls me from a Swiss number.
Of the 45 interview minutes, we spent the first 5 minutes trying to connect because it was his first interview so he didn’t know how it worked. The following 5 minutes, he wanted to know some stories about my CV.
The excercise was : https://leetcode.com/problems/similar-rgb-color/
I wasn’t so familiar with hexadecimals so it took about 15 minutes to understand the problem (you have to take into account that sometimes the interviewers don’t have ready examples like on leetcode, but they create them during the interview with you). After that, 20 minutes where not enough to finish the whole exercise. I did write a very clean code but apparently it was not enough. Exactly at 1:45 pm (the interview was scheduled at 1pm but started some minutes later) he said: “time is up, tell me how you would finish the excercise”. I tried to tell a story but he probably didn’t even want to hear to it anymore…
When the recruiter asked me again about the experience, I told her this time I was satisfied. I could understand the interviewer and the questions where those I had to prepare for.