I applied online. I interviewed at Block in Aug 2020
Interview
Applied online had one telephonic code pairing round then onsite(virtual).
3 code pairing round 1 system design 1 past experience and the last one was with the hiring manager.
A week later got a call from the recruiter and she told that "there was nothing major negative feedback from the team but you were not quite there".
I have given so many interviews and almost always I know if I did well or not. This time I expected an offer considering my performance but it went another way.
In retrospective what did I do wrong:
I first code pairing I did 3 parts of the question, first was big other two were small. In the second & third code pairing, I did only one round and then I was out of time.
In all three code pairing and in each part of the coding they had their own test cases all of them passed. So, logic was not the problem, then what was it?
I selected Golang as my language and its little verbose than C# LINQ & Java lambda, which took some of my time.
So, I think in order to clear the coding round one must do at least 3 parts.
Even though you have the liberty to google for syntax or anything but that eats up your precious time.
After spending 7hr in the process I feel like I shouldn't have applied for the position. It definitely hurts my confidence.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Other than the telephonic round no data structure at all which was surprising.
Telephonic:
Top K Frequent element.
Onsite :
Select k random item from an array of size n
some gaming question, pretty easy one can't go wrong on that.
some selection of item form n elements, medium level question
Design hotel booking system
past experience
Inital take home, followed by extension interview, followed by a coding challenge, followed by system design interview.
The whole process took 3 months!
The interviewers are usually really nice and want you to do your best.
The interviewer was nice, and he is friendly and willing to give hint, the question has 2 follow-ups, it was hard to complete in time. The question was not a typical LeetCode
Phone screen and then a full day of interviews. 3 pair programming challenges, a system design review and a prior experience interview. There was also an onsite lunch with a person from the company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
To design a hotel booking system. Pick any part (backend, frontend, database, api etc) and deepdive into that, explaining the decisions along the way.
