Status: 6 year Experience
Position: SWE
Location: California
Contacted by a recruiter and had a 15 minute rushed conversation with the recruiter. He was a little slow - he asked me my location 3 times and kept asking me the same thing twice. He was clearly in a rush and didn’t let me ask him any questions before ending the phone call. I emailed him with some questions later on in the day and he didn’t respond to those. He only responded to matters relating to scheduling the phone interview. All of his replies were of course templated auto-responses. Very unprofessional.
He then sent me an online quiz.
Online quiz:
Given an array of n integers where n > 1, nums, return an array output such that output[i] is equal to the product of all the elements of nums except nums[i].
After I submitted that, a couple of days later, he asked to set up a phone interview with a Solutions Engineer.
Phone screen:
The interviewer called 5 minutes late. He was very inexperienced at interviewing. 8 months on the job.
Questions:
- Why do you want to be a solutions engineer
- What was the biggest challenge
- He then asked me a LC hard question (on coderpad):
Remove Invalid Parentheses - Remove the minimum number of invalid parentheses in order to make the input string valid.
He had clearly pasted this question from LC or somewhere and he didn’t have a clue about what the question was. He wasn’t able to answer any of my questions regarding the question it self - I asked him what a valid parentheses was in this scenario and there was a long pause from his side. He was not experienced in interviewing and that combined with his lack of technical skills and sparse knowledge of the question made the interview very difficult.
He was looking for an ‘optimized stack solution’ . I wasn’t able to come up with it. I did however give him an optimized backtracking and another BFS solution and he wasn’t happy with that. He eventually got audibly frustrated and asked to “code it up” and when I asked which solution, he said “anything”. I coded up the solution (which I compiled later on an IDE and it worked beautifully).
I am not sure what this optimized stack solution is but clearly not solving the problem EXACTLY the way he wanted it was grounds to reject me. Really closed minded of Facebook. Apparently they let anyone to conduct an interview.
He did leave 3 minutes at the end for questions. So that was good.