Status: New grad, MS CS Top 50 CS school
Position: SDE1 at Trip Advisor
Location: Needham, MA
Date: Mid January, 2019
Interview Process:
Phone Interview (~1 hour):
A very basic question relating to tree traversal (very easy). A couple of OOP questions, questions about how the web works and some DB queries.
Since, I was able to solve to solve the coding part in a short time, the interview ended up having more questions around OOP concepts and web related technologies that I had worked on before.
Take home Test:
Pretty straight forward take-home test but the main focus on the design than the actual implementation. I repeat, focus on the design than actually getting the implementation as they look how good you’re at designing your solutions.
Question: Can be easily found on Github
On Site: 3 interviews (2 coding and 1 behavioral of 1 hour each all on whiteboard)
Round 1 (Behavioral):
Was pretty straightforward with discussion revolving around what I’ve done so far, my interests outside of work and what the engineer did on the team and the career progression at the company
Round 2 (coding interview):
Questions are pretty straightforward in my opinion and was able to solve to solve them fairly quick but I’m not sure what the engineers are looking for. I was able to work through the problem and find an optimal solution but they weren’t satisfied.
Had 2 questions overall of which the first one I took 15 mins to solve after the initial discussion about the work the team does etc. The second question I was able to give an answer right away as it involved mathematics than logical reasoning.
Round 3 (System Design):
The interviewer had prepared a problem made out of something that the engineers at TripAdvisor worked at and wanted to know how I could solve the problem at scale. This involved coding too. The discussion was pretty good as I was able to come up with better approaches through discussion and sometimes needed hints but was able to arrive at a decent solution. The interview is quite open-ended and can go any way as it depends as how you try to attack the problem
Culture:
The office is simply amazing! One of the best I’ve seen so far out of the many on-sites I went to.
The people are really friendly at the office and it’s a pet-friendly office too. You can almost sit whereever for lunch and can talk to anyone which I feel is the most important thing in a company.
They have free lunch everyday with different options.
Since, I was local they didn’t have me stay at a hotel.
Takeaway:
My takeaway was quite average to be honest. I thought I nailed the interview but when I asked for feedback from the recruiter she said that I got while solving a problem which I guess happens to most of us and the key part of any interview I believe should be problem-solving skills and not judge a person if he/she is able to propose the best solution the first time.
I still feel it’s a great company to work for and have some really interesting problems and engineering challenges but I feel the interview process can be a bit better.