tintran

The application and phone screen steps were the usual ones. They are available on other channels, such as Glassdoor and blog posts. In this post, I will only talk about the things specific to my onsite interviews and the things I could have done better.

Metadata

• I interviewed with Google Sydney in November 2017 and Facebook Singapore in December 2017.
• Both interviews were for Android engineer positions.
• I failed both.

My Preparation

• 6.006 course from MIT on YouTube, about twice for each lecture.
• Code Jam 2017. I could not get to round 2.
• Kick Start 2017. My best rank was 239 in round C.
• HackerRank and LeetCode, about 200 problems, with only a few hard problems.
• Cracking the Coding Interview. I did most of the problems, with only a couple of problems from the hard section.

The Onsite

My Google onsite consisted of 5 coding interviews on a single day. They were heavy on algorithms and data structures. The questions were around hard difficulty on LeetCode. Usually, each interview started with a warmup question, around medium difficulty, then got more difficult as I solved them.

Facebook asked not only coding questions, but also system design and behavioral questions. The questions were relatively easier. I did give correct solutions, but that was not enough. I should have shown how I arrived at the solution. My recruiter suggested that I work on algorithms and data structures, so I guess that was the reason for rejection.

Why I Could Have Done Better

For Google, I should have solved more hard problems. Do not fall into the trap of pattern matching, especially for ad-hoc problems. The key is to strengthen problem-solving skill, not study the kinds or categories of problems and then pattern match them.

Read more: Planning an Approach to a Topcoder Problem, Part 1

For Facebook, I should have thought and explained more critically.

I will try again in 2018.