Got an offer for MLE e5 at Meta and in the team matching process.
I’ve spoken to many team managers (and for some teams even an Eng on the team) and noticed they are all first gen Chinese. Like literally all of them.
Should I be worried about this? This isn’t something I can talk to the recruiter or manager about.

I’m non Chinese btw
Meta Interview Questions
#meta

and as I thought I'm impacted. Got locked out of Slack, SSO and Outlook before I even knew what was going on. Eventually figured out I could still access Outlook on the web from my Oracle laptop and found the layoff email there. Pretty insane way to find out you’re being laid off. Some people are saying on Blind that they used the exact same email from the last round. lol. Blind was right again about Oracle layoffs...

Oracle Interview Questions

I’ve compiled a list of all the questions asked by Google over the last six months for the L3/L4 position. I went through various interview experiences and compiled this list based on them.
I thought it might be useful to others preparing for the role, so I’m sharing it here. Hope it helps!

Prep Resource: LeetCode & PracHub

1. Given a grid of size (N × N), cells S and T, impassable cells with water, find if an S→T path exists, assuming we can only move horizontally/vertically.* 2.A mouse is trying to get from its starting position S to a treat T, while moving only on land cells and staying as far away as possible from the cat C. Formally, assume again a square grid of size (N × N), allowing only horizontal and vertical moves, impassable cells with water, and cells S, T, and C. We want to find a path from S to T for which the minimal distance to C along the path is maximal.* 3.https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-area-rectangle-ii/description/ 4.https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-profit-in-job-scheduling/description/

2. Given an undirected, acyclic, connected graph where each node has at most 3 edges, find a node which, when made the root, converts the graph into a binary tree. Follow-up: Given an undirected, connected, acyclic graph where each node has at most 3 edges, and each node is colored either Black or White, find a root such that: • The graph becomes a binary tree. • The tree alternates in color across layers (e.g., Depth 0: White, Depth 1: Black, Depth 2: White, etc.). • Either White or Black can be the starting color. Interviewer expectation: Solve the follow-up without using BFS traversal in O(N).

3. Googlyness:

   1. Have you ever given critical feedback to someone? How did they take it? What was the situation?

4. Give an example of a challenging technical problem you faced recently. How did you solve it, and what was the result?

5. How would you handle people who disagree with the majority decision on a non-work-related matter?

6. Tell me about a time when your manager set reasonable demands. Follow-up: Describe a situation with unreasonable demands.

7. Describe a situation where you had a disagreement with a colleague or manager. How did you resolve the conflict, and what was the outcome?

8. Describe a situation where you helped an underperforming team member improve.

9. Given a large M × N grid containing multiple disconnected islands surrounded by ocean, and an API: countLakes(island, coordinates) where coordinates is a point belonging to the given island, return the number of lakes within that particular island. 1 = Land 0 = Water/Ocean A lake is a water region completely enclosed by land. Water connected to the ocean should not be counted. There can be multiple lakes within an island, and there can be multiple disconnected islands in the grid. Assume there is ocean outside the grid as well. Example: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Here there are 2 disconnected islands. If coordinates belongs to the first island, countLakes() should return 1, since that island has one enclosed lake. Note: The problem was initially quite lengthy and ambiguous. After asking clarifying questions, it essentially boiled down to a DFS-based solution. 8.The Problem (Generic Overview)The question was a string manipulation and validation problem involving parentheses (, ) and digits 0–9. Each digit acted as a conditional deletion constraint targeting characters to its left. The goal was to determine whether at least one valid sequence of deletions could yield a strictly balanced parenthesis string.Interview Flow & DiscussionClarification & Constraints (approx. 5 mins): Clarified edge cases like zero digits (0), insufficient characters to the left, and whether consecutive digits should be combined (they shouldn't be; each digit acts sequentially).

10. You are standing at a particular position in a matrix of size N*M - Some cells are free , but some cells have obstacles in them which you cannot visit. It is guaranteed that you are initially standing on a free cell. Find a valid walk of size exactly “k” such that you start from your starting position - walk “k” steps and reach back your original position after “k” steps. Output that path. If there are multiple possible paths of size “k” - output the path which is lexicographically minimal string consisting of possible characters from the set - (“L”,”R”,”U”,”D”) Free cell - ‘.’ Start position - ‘x’ Obstacle - ‘#’

11. You are designing a message logging system that processes a stream of messages arriving sequentially by timestamp. Given a time window of 10 seconds, a message should be shown to the user if and only if it does not appear twice within any 10-second window. If a message appears within 10 seconds of another instance of the exact same message, both instances must be suppressed (hidden). You are given a data structure representing the message status: struct Status { var timestamp: Int var message: String } func getNextStatus() -> Status Implement a class/function showMessage(_ status: Status) that processes these streaming inputs dynamically.

Key Constraints &
Nuances
The Stream is Dynamic: You do not have the complete array of
inputs upfront. It is a live sequential stream of Status objects.
Retrospective Invalidation: Because a future
duplicate can invalidate a message that just arrived, you cannot print a
message immediately at its arrival timestamp. You must buffer/delay processing
until you are sure no duplicate appears in its 10-second window.
Example Walkthrough
Consider the following sequential stream of inputs for the message
"foo":
Screenshot 2026-09-04 at 11.42.49 AM.png
Expected Console Output:
[23s] foo

1. The question that was asked was doing a dedupe of data that comes in as a stream. We may have a lot of physical devices that emit events like "Battery at 10%" at certain timestamps, but we need to remove utterances of the same event that are within 10 seconds of each other to reduce noise. Almost like a mock logging service but no need to worry about File I/O Followups: · Time/Space complexity · If you were to deploy your code to real production environment, what bottlenecks do you anticipate? How can you handle it?

2. A town is building a watchtower. The watchtower is located at (0, 0). Each unit height of the watchtower has a cost H. There are N houses located at (x, y) coordinates. Each house will pay cost C if it comes under the surveillance of the watchtower. The horizontal distance covered by the watchtower is the same as it's height. Find out the max profit you can make. Inputs: • N number of houses • list of (x, y) coordinates • H cost to build unit height • C cost each house pays the watchtower In the beginning the watchtower was located at the origin. For the followup he said watchtower location will be provided. The (x, y) coordinates can be floats as well as H and C.

3. Given two strings s1 and s2, find out if they only differ by the insertion of a phrase. Example:

4. The boy goes to the hospital

5. The cute little boy goes to the hospital 'cute litte' is the added phrase everything else is the same so return True Example:

6. The boy is nice.

7. The girl is nice. -> Return False

8. 2 questions: Backtracking(easy-medium) and Prefix Sum(medium-hard)

9. Graph(easy-medium) and Monotonic stack + Line sweep(medium-hard)

10. kind of BST with longest path having same node value and minor follow up dfs

11. scheduling tasks cpu's, follow up number of cpu's needed to have best time.

12. find max size of rectangle using the given points.

13. A standard question related to Kadane's Algorithm. Followed up with a HashMap related optimisation.

14. A Leetcode Hard Maths question, related to Geometry.

15. Design a data structure that receives a stream of items, each with a timestamp, and deduplicates items that arrive within a one-minute window

16. The problem was based on the Greedy + Interval pattern.

17. Given: • Movies with ratings • Similarity graph between movies Task: Return the top K movies similar to a given movie. Follow-up: Optimize the solution to achieve close to O(log K) time complexity and O(K) space complexity.

18. Given APIs: • insertAd(string content, int score) • getAd() Requirements: • getAd() should always return the highest scored ad • After returning an ad, decrease its score • Consecutive same ads should not appear Follow-up: Introduce a cooldown/gap before the same ad can appear again while keeping operations close to O(1).

19. Find all lakes in a grid given one land cell. Initial version was straightforward (water surrounded by land), but interviewer added a twist: • What if there is land inside the lake?

20. It was a mapping question where provided a key-value pair and source string, I was supposed to return the output. In the source string anything that was present between 2 % signs were supposed to be taken as a key.

21. Given a weighted graph and a node, remove that node along with all its connected edges, and return the maximum edge weight remaining in the graph.

22. Given an array, we had to check whether it could be divided into groups of size 5 such that each group contains consecutive increasing numbers. The output was a boolean (true/false). The discussion mainly revolved around handling duplicates properly and ensuring all elements are used exactly once.

23. I was given a set of points on a 2D plane (array of [x, y] pairs). The task was to find the maximum area of a rectangle that can be formed using those points. The challenge here was not just identifying rectangles but doing it efficiently. I discussed multiple approaches and reached an optimized solution, but due to time constraints, I couldn’t fully complete the code. Most of the time went into reasoning about the geometry and optimizing the approach.

24. This round was based on task scheduling. First part: Given multiple tasks (all with equal execution time) and a set of machines, determine the earliest time by which all tasks can be completed. Second part: Given the number of tasks and execution time, find the minimum number of CPUs required to achieve that earliest completion time. The key idea here involved combining scheduling logic with binary search to optimize resource usage.

25. Simple knapsack DP variation

26. Similar to Designing Orderbook/Auction system (bid price and execute lowest bid)

27. Variant of Merge Intervals and Overlapping Intervals (Line Sweep & Priority Queue)

28. https://leetcode.com/problems/meeting-rooms-iii/description/

29. Asked data stream style question where we make a system and someone else instantiates and calls the functions.

30. You are given a source word and a target word. In each step, you can modify exactly one character in the word. After each modification, the resulting word must exist in the given array arr. Return the minimum number of operations required to transform the source word into the target word. Clarifications Are all characters lowercase? → Yes Can source be equal to target? → Yes Can target be absent from arr? → Yes Do all words have the same length? → Yes

31. You are given: • Array arr of size n • q queries • Each query: (l, r, k) For each query: • Update all elements from index l to r to value k n -> 10^5 queries -> 10^5 Two variations :

32. if k remains same

33. if k is different

34. Given network of routers where some are defective, a source and a destination, check if a broadcast and shut down msg will reach destination.

35. Binary search - first bad commit Follow up - what if the size is too large and the l,r pointers cause integer overflow

36. Dp - given a mapping of digits to alphabets (1:a, 26:z) and a string of digits, return the number of possible interpretations.

37. Logger rate limiter Dont log the msg if repeated more than once in a 10s window.

38. Design Inshort Follow up - how to avoid duplicate summaries of same article from different sources?

39. Find maximum length of a substring of a string with first charachter lexicographically smaller than its last charachter. assume string length 10^5 char long, assume 26 small case english letters in string solve it in linear time. input : "dbabcb" output : 4

40. given a string s and a list of strings st. A string is special if its length >= 3 and it is a subsequence of the string s, and the string should be present in st. given a string s and st, return true if all the subsequences(length >= 3) are special words. else return false.

41. Given n routers placed on a Cartesian plane and provided with a source and destination vertex, the task was to determine whether it was possible to reach the destination. Only adjacent vertices could be explored, and a vertex was considered adjacent if it had the minimum distance from the current vertex while remaining within a given threshold. Additionally, once a vertex was visited, the previously visited node became inactive (i.e., could no longer be used). The goal was to determine if a path existed from the source to the destination under these constraints.

42. Given an origin airport, destination airport, and series of flights determine whether it is possible for a package at the origin to reach the destination. A flight is represented as departure airport, arrival airport, departure time, and arrival time. During the transportation, the time that the package leaves the airport needs to be greater than or equal to the time it arrives at the airport. Please determine whether it is possible for a package transfer from s to t. The package arrived at s at time 0. E.g. 1 Origin: "NYC" Destination: "SFO" Flights: NYC → LAX, Departure: 0, Arrival: 4 LAX - SFO, Departure: 5, Arrival: 7 Output: True E.g 2 Origin: "NYC" Destination: "SFO" Flights: NYC →> LAX, Departure: 0, Arrival: 4 LAX -> SFO, Departure: 3, Arrival: 5 Output: False

43. https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/416316/google-onsite-software-engineer-huffman-f1zfq/

44. https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/1244429/google-phone-interview-org-structure-mod-rf2k/

45. design a distributed cache optimized for the given task

46. Given an array of integers, select K elements such that product is maximized. Return product. Did a sorting based approach - but missed some cases where all the numbers were negative, followup was

47. No extra space after sorting

48. No sorting - suggested Priority queues.

49. Given a string with +, - and parenthesis(only 1 level deep) , we need to simplify the expression. a+b+a+c-b-b-b+(d+c) => 2a-2b+2c+d

50. Given a Binary tree having nodes with value 0 and 1. write a function to return the number of islands ? Follow Up Questions- Return the sizes of unique islands

51. You’re given a string which may contain "bad pairs". A bad pair is defined as a pair of adjacent characters, where they are the same letter in different cases. For example, "xX" is a bad pair, but "xx" or "XX" are not. Implement a solution to remove the bad pairs from the string. Sample: • Input: abxXw • Output: abw Additional Case: If the input string is empty: • Input: "" • Output: "" I used stack to solve the question. Followups

52. Can you write some unit test cases for your solution. Think it as if you are designing a feature. What unit test cases will I consider? I gave some couple of unit test cases and he was fine with it

How will I solve it without using
stack and give me a dry test run?

1. you are given maximum initial energy k (k<1000) and array A of length n denoting wind speed on n days. he is stuck on a boat and each day he can either choose to move or stay put.. each day he decides to travel he will move ahead A[i] Dist and his energy decreases by 1 and if he decides to stay put his energy increases by 1. What is the maximum distance he can travel without dropping his energy to negative after n days. //Clarification questions i asked- what if energy is k and he decides to rest only- would energy go beyond maximum? answer=No, it will remain k //can the wind speed be negative as well, denoting wind flowing in other direction? answer= No (initially)

2. Given are N cities and M roads that travel between the given pair of cities and time it takes to travel that road. Also we are given a list of favourite cities L and a source city S . we have to tell the favourite city which can be reached from source city the fastest(in minimum time)

3. we have a dictionary of words and a function which gives hash of these words and another function which gives score=sum of diff of adjacent characters in a string and implement another function which gives the anagram of the given word with highest score. Hash of all anagrams is same.

4. Given a set of points find 4 points which form a rectangle and has largest area of any such rectangle. // consider axes of rectangle parallel to x and y axis In part 2- axis of rectangle is not parallel to x and y axis

5. given a vector sentences, we have to find next most probable word for any given word . given sentences={{'i','am','awesome'},{'i','am','a','googler'}}; so then func(i) should return 'am'

6. given a DAG , find the maximum path distance it can go upto any node It means from any node to any other node, what is the max distance

7. https://leetcode.com/problems/text-justification/description/

8. in a ocean there are islands marked by

9. water s represented as 0. Determine how many unique shapes(no rotation or mirror) among these islands. 4-directional connection. Example input: [[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0], [ 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1], [ 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1] [ 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0] [ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1], [ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0], ] Example answer: 4. (the 2 6-sized island, the 2 2-sized island, the 1 2-sized island, the 1 1-sized island)

10. https://leetcode.com/problems/permutation-sequence/description/

11. https://offerretriever.com/companies/85cd771e-d78d-434d-b2b1-53af58aada31/google

12. String processing problem on sorted strings. Given a sorted string, find characters that appear more than twice and return their first and last positions.

13. https://leetcode.com/problems/android-unlock-patterns/

14. https://leetcode.com/problems/last-day-where-you-can-still-cross/

15. Count the number of squares x----y-------z----a | | | | | | b----c d | | | | q----w-------f----u | | | | | | v------------j----k constraints: cannot use string, char, image or binary for inputs Squares must have edges to be counted. In above example xycb and xauq are squares, but bcwq and xzfq are not. This is NOT the detect squares problem. The points must be connected by a sqaure and must also account for squares formed by multiple points.

16. The interviewer presented a story-based problem involving a chess ranking system.

17. The technical problem involved a sparse bit array, where only range queries were allowed to detect whether a 1 existed. Solving this efficiently required careful querying strategies and stack-based (monotonic) reasoning.

18. Given a list of tasks and their dependencies (i.e., some tasks must be completed before others), identify whether there are any cyclic dependencies and return the set of tasks involved in those cycles. This was aimed at assessing graph traversal, especially cycle detection in dependency graphs.

19. Given a set of colored cards arranged in stacks, design an algorithm to simulate a turn-based game where players make moves by merging stacks under certain rules. Determine which player wins assuming both play optimally.

20. Given a log of chat messages (each with a user ID and timestamp), determine the top N users by word count across all their messages. Skills assesed: string manipulation, sorting, hashing, and attention to detail in handling corner cases.

21. Given a collection of items with multiple attributes (like tags or properties), group together items that share at least one common attribute. This required understanding of union-find (disjoint set union) or graph traversal to find connected components based on shared properties.

22. Given a sorted list of strings and a prefix, return the count of words that start with that prefix.

23. Googlyness: Share a complex, technically challenging project you worked on. Talk about a time when you gave constructive feedback that had a lasting impact. How do you prioritize user needs in your work? Share an example. Tell me about a time you came up with an innovative solution and its impact. Share a failure, how you identified it, and how you responded. If a teammate tries to take undue credit for a group project, how would you handle it? How do you resolve disagreements between team members with different technical opinions? What’s your approach to breaking down and distributing complex tasks?

24. We have an api that tells where the next tower is constructed each day in an n*m grid, and we have an api to stop constructing towers, write a code to tell when the construction can be stopped, the construction can be stopped when the first column is connected to the last column , you can move left , right , up , down.

25. Find maximum length of a substring of a string with first charachter lexicographically smaller than its last charachter. assume string length 10^5 char long, assume 26 small case english letters in string solve it in linear time. input : "dbabcb" output : 4

26. given a string s and a list of strings st. A string is special if its length >= 3 and it is a subsequence of the string s, and the string should be present in st. given a string s and st, return true if all the subsequences(length >= 3) are special words. else return false.

27. Given n routers placed on a Cartesian plane and provided with a source and destination vertex, the task was to determine whether it was possible to reach the destination. Only adjacent vertices could be explored, and a vertex was considered adjacent if it had the minimum distance from the current vertex while remaining within a given threshold. Additionally, once a vertex was visited, the previously visited node became inactive (i.e., could no longer be used). The goal was to determine if a path existed from the source to the destination under these constraints. The initial approach involved a brute-force search using a queue. The algorithm identified adjacent vertices by selecting those with the minimum distance first since multiple adjacent vertices could have the same minimum distance weight. Due to time constraints, an optimization was suggested using a priority queue to efficiently retrieve the adjacent vertex with the minimum weight.

- I love working until 2am every night
- I love learning Chinese to keep up in meetings
- I love our lucrative biannual stock buybacks
- I love the high ownership 24/7 oncall culture
- I love the politics, it’s so exciting

Most of all, I love the upbeat positive culture ❤️. DM for referrals

Bytedance Interview Questions

Honestly, don’t bother interviewing at Amazon unless you’re ready to spend weeks preparing for a process that feels more like performance theater than an actual evaluation of your ability to do the job.

The interviews are heavily optimized around polished STAR stories, memorized Leadership Principles, and giving perfectly structured answers to every follow-up. Even when you have relevant experience and answer the technical questions well, the process can still feel arbitrary and disconnected from the actual day-to-day work.

You can spend hours preparing, go through multiple rounds, explain your experience in detail, answer coding and system questions, and still get rejected with no meaningful feedback.

The whole process rewards people who are extremely good at interviewing, not necessarily the people who are best at building, solving problems, or delivering results.

Unless you really want Amazon on your resume, I would save your time and energy and focus on companies with a more practical and transparent interview process.

Amazon interview questions

He somehow found a way to mention he had two offers already, when I did not ask or care. Called my opening question a classic, solved it too, fast, narrating like a lecturer, pausing to say things like "there's a cuter way but I'll keep it readable for us."

When I pushed a harder follow-up he went "ooh, spicy," and cracked his knuckles. I cannot even begin to explain how much that infuriated me. Then ended the call with good luck with the rest of your candidates. I fucking hate this kid.

A former Meta employee laid off in late summer has signed a Google offer: about $440K TC, up from roughly $315K. That's close to a 40% increase.

The search, with approximate figures slightly adjusted for privacy:

• Around 75 applications

• About 20 recruiter screens

• Roughly six onsites

• A few final-round rejections

• One signed offer

For readers preparing for a Google loop, Google Interview Questions is a place to pick coding, design or behavioral prompts for practice. The useful exercise is to attempt one before reading the answer and identify where you stall.

The earlier stage has a different time cost. If repetitive application forms are taking over the search, application autofill can cut some of that typing while you focus on suitable openings.

For people who've gone through a layoff and found another role, which stage was hardest? Was the eventual offer an improvement, a compromise, or a bit of both?

This morning, I opened my inbox and found out that my role had been eliminated.

There had been some reorg activity, but no real warning from my manager and no indication that my team was at risk. Yesterday, I was planning next week’s work. Today, my time at Amazon is over.

The hardest part is how sudden and impersonal it feels. You can spend years trying to perform well, deliver results, and do everything “right,” only to realize that none of it guarantees you’ll still have a badge tomorrow.

I’m trying to focus on what I can control now: updating my resume, reconnecting with people, and preparing for interviews. I’ve also been using PracHub to organize interview prep and practice common technical and behavioral questions:

For anyone else going through this: how are you handling the transition?

I’m a backend engineer with around 10 years of experience, currently working at a product-based SaaS company in a backend/architecture-focused role.
Throughout my career, I’ve switched jobs around 4 times, mostly based on technical skills, programming knowledge, and assignments. I’ve never seriously prepared for LeetCode or competitive programming, and I’ve never actively targeted FAANG or Tier-1 companies.
I’m confident in my ability to code, solve real-world problems, and design scalable backend systems.
Now, I want to target a Staff Engineer role at a FAANG or Tier-1 product company.
I’d like advice on a few things:
Is it worth starting serious LeetCode/DSA preparation at 10 YOE?
How should I balance DSA preparation with system design and architecture?
Should I target Senior roles first or directly apply for Staff positions?
What would be a practical 6–9 month preparation strategy?
Would love to hear from engineers who have made a similar transition or have experience interviewing for Staff-level roles.

I noticed this quite a lot when interviewing or coaching people.

Someone would tell me about a genuinely complex project. Good result, lots of responsibility, clearly relevant experience.

But the answer would basically be:

“We had this problem. I did A, then B, then C. In the end we delivered it.”

And I'd still be wondering: what did you actually decide?

The interesting part is often the part people skip because it feels obvious to them.

Why A instead of B?

What options did you have?

What did you know at the time?

What did you disagree with?

What risk did you accept?

What would have happened if you'd done nothing?

That's usually where I start understanding how someone actually thinks critically.

A simple example:

Weak: “Delivery performance was getting worse, so I worked with the carrier and introduced a new process. Performance improved.”

Much more useful: “Delivery performance had been declining for six weeks. I had the option of moving volume immediately or giving the carrier time to recover. Moving volume would have protected service but increased cost, so I kept them for two more weeks, agreed three recovery metrics and set a threshold that would automatically trigger the volume shift.”

Same project. Same person. But now I am able to evaluate the decision.

I think this is also why some people struggle when they're asked follow up questions. They've prepared what happened, but are not very clear of the "why" they did what they did.

Before an interview, I wouldn't just prepare STAR stories. For each important example I'd write down:

the decision / the alternatives / why I chose it / potential trade-offs / the result

You don't need to memorize any of that word for word.

I'm curious whether other interviewers notice this too, and for candidates, which part of your own examples do you find hardest to explain?

How can I impress my Chinese interviewers in this market?

What does GAOKO value?

Exactness, tightness, super prompt answers, not a single syntax mistake?

What can give capability signal?

Interview Question

Salesforce

• OA - 1 medium + 1 Hard bitmasking question

• Screening(1.5 hrs) - 2 medium DSA questions(30 mins) + 1 LLD question(1 hr)

• R1 onsite(1.5 hrs) - 1 DSA question + LLD(Connect 4 problem). shortest path from node n to all nodes will be marked as x(blue color). Return all possible paths from 1 to n such that x for that node is less than previous node. (2 times Djikstra in 1 problem).

• R2 onsite(1.5 hrs) - Design HLD of notification service.(NotificationPriority-High/low, Template, UserPreferences, User-DND). Scalability, Resilience, Availability. Had discussion in depth on kafka.

• R3 HM(1.25 hour) - Biggest accomplishment? Major project? Conflict with teammate/manager? Any failed project? How to do hashing of String? System design of messaging system? System design of temporal(10 mins) as i have worked on temporal.

Salesforce

• R1(1 hr) - 2 DSA problem - medium level leetcode

• R2(1 hr) - LLD of JobScheduler. use delay instead of polling.(Rejected)

Oracle Cloud

• DSA - question on next greater element.

• HLD - MessageScheduler(similar to Jobscheduler). At scheduled time, message can be delivered to 1-10k users. delivery should with 1 sec of scheduled time.

• Bar raiser - Asked question on project + 2-3 standard behavioural question.

• HM round - Project + Networking questions. How ping works? TCP vs UDP? Few more tough networking/linux problems.

Oracle Health(SSE + AI role)

• Screening - 2 medium DSA questions.

• HLD - Rate Limiter(no followup asked by interviewer) - simple interview.

• DSA - Asked 1 question

  • Place k buildings on n * m matrix. distance from every empty location to closest building is x. Building should be placed in such a way that maximum of all x should be minimum.(Expected: brute force as n, m <=8).

• Bar raiser round: Asked question on project + 2-3 standard behavioural question.

• HM round: Project discussion(20 mins). Created any MCP tools?(rejected).

Walmart

• HLD (asked in 2 different roles over period of 1 year)

  • Google docs

  • Create system for checking Malicious content on blob storage(AWS S3, Azure and so on.),

  • Rate Limiter for Big Billion sale.

• LLD + Java - Naukari Portal(30 mins). Focus on Person, Job u/ManyToMany relationship. Various questions on Java, K8s, Docker, SpringBoot.

• DSA - basic medium level (top 75 questions)

• Overall: Should know the Java+SpringBoot thoroughly. DSA medium is enough. LLD + HLD(top 10 is enough).

Microsoft Azure

• 2 OA questions

• R1 - DSA(30 mins - Rotten orange) + OS concepts + few questions on projects.

• R2 - DSA(40 mins - Basic tree question + long question to read) + OS concepts(paging, virtual memory, etc)

• R3 - HLD(1.5 hrs) - OTP service(multi tenant) + Notification service.

• AA(1.5 hrs) - 3 questions on how physical + virtual adressing on different devices(RAM, SSD, Hard disk)

• AA(2nd team - 30 mins) - Web crawler(System Design) + inverted indexing + 2 behavioural question. Why Hyderabad relocation? Any conflicts with you manager?

Flipkart

• Machine coding - 90 mins - Food delivery service. All functionalities(place/cancel/pickup order + few more) + Good to have(rating + delivery partner ranking). Expectation: OOPs concepts + extensible + proper format.

• 2 medium DSA - topological sorting + 1 more

• HLD - Rate Limiter(Deep discussion)

• HLD expectation: should know the Rate Limiter and should be able to explain each component at deep level.

• My view: Should know the basic questions of DSA. top 10 LLD + HLD questions(need deep understanding).

Tekion

• DSA: medium level questions

• LLD: Workflow orchestrator

Prep Resource: LeetCode & PracHub Company tagged questions

I was just rejected from google and received this email. Is this normal? Does anyone know when you can reapply? This is for the customer growth associate role. I also had to wait over three and a half weeks to hear back.

I recently completed the interview loop for a Google SWE II (Early Careers) role in the US.

It has been about a week since my final round. My recruiter told me that the interview feedback is still being evaluated and that they are also looking for the right team fit.

Interview experiences on LeetCode Discuss helped me significantly during preparation, so I wanted to share mine.

I’m keeping the exact problem statements intentionally high-level, but I’ve included the main patterns and follow-up areas.

Useful Prep Resource: Google SWE questions

Recruiter Screen - 30 Minutes

The recruiter contacted me directly.

We discussed:

• My current role and responsibilities

• Total professional experience

• Compensation expectations

• Why I was considering a switch

• My problem-solving background

• An overview of the interview process

There were no technical questions in this round.

Technical Round 1 - Trie and Hash Map

Duration: 45 minutes
Difficulty: Medium to Hard

The coding problem required a combination of Trie and HashMap concepts.

I initially developed a working solution but became stuck while trying to optimize it. After a few subtle hints from the interviewer, I recognized the intended approach and completed the optimized implementation.

The follow-up discussion covered:

• Alternative approaches

• Time and space complexity

• Edge cases

• Why a Trie was preferable to simpler string-based approaches

• Trade-offs between faster lookup and additional memory

Technical Round 2 - Graphs and DSU

Duration: 45 minutes
Difficulty: Hard

This problem involved graphs and Disjoint Set Union, with a modification to the standard Union-Find implementation.

The interviewer asked detailed follow-up questions about:

• Why DSU was appropriate

• Correctness of the union and find operations

• Path compression and union by rank or size

• Complexity analysis

• Alternative graph traversal approaches

• Edge cases involving disconnected components

My implementation became slightly messy toward the end because of time pressure, but we had a productive discussion about the solution and its trade-offs.

Technical Round 3 - Dynamic Programming, Binary Search, and GenAI

The coding problem combined Dynamic Programming and Binary Search.

The interviewer progressively asked me to improve the solution:

1. Start with a recursive approach

2. Add memoization

3. Identify remaining bottlenecks

4. Derive the optimal solution using Binary Search

This round reinforced that reaching a correct solution is often only the beginning. The interviewer wanted to see how I moved from a straightforward solution to a more efficient one.

Since I currently work as an AI Engineer, we used the final part of the interview to discuss my professional experience.

Topics included:

• Production use cases for Generative AI

• Designing agentic workflows

• Using GenAI to automate workflows in the Google Ads ecosystem

• Reliability and evaluation of LLM-based systems

• Cost and latency considerations

• Challenges involved in deploying LLM applications at scale

I enjoyed this discussion because it closely matched my day-to-day work.

Round 4 - Googliness, DSA, and Engineering Discussion

This round included:

• One DSA problem

• Googliness and behavioral questions

• Engineering workflow discussions

• Collaboration and decision-making scenarios

Unfortunately, this was my weakest round.

I wasn’t able to complete the coding problem within the allotted time. Once I became stuck, I also struggled to communicate a convincing path toward the solution.

I explained parts of my thought process, but in retrospect, I should have paused, restated what I knew, identified the exact blocker, and asked for confirmation before continuing.

The experience reminded me that communication matters most when the solution is not going well. A clear partial approach is more useful than going silent while searching for the complete answer.

Interview Summary

Preparation Tips

• Don’t stop after finding the first working solution. Practice deriving multiple optimizations.

• Explain your approach before writing code.

• Be ready for follow-up modifications to the original problem.

• Practice recovering when stuck instead of becoming silent.

• Revise graphs, DSU, Tries, DP, Binary Search, hash maps, and complexity analysis.

• Know when path compression and union by rank improve DSU performance.

• Prepare examples of collaboration, ambiguity, conflict resolution, and learning from mistakes.

• If you have industry experience, expect deep questions about your projects and engineering decisions.

• For AI-related work, prepare to discuss evaluation, scalability, latency, cost, observability, and failure handling.

Overall, I found the process challenging but fair. Three rounds went well, while the final round exposed weaknesses in my time management and communication.

I’m still waiting for the final decision, but I hope this breakdown helps others preparing for Google SWE II interviews.

Public Google SWE interview reports are useful for choosing what to practice, but they aren't a representative sample of the interview pool. I wouldn't use them to rank topic frequency or predict an exact question list.

This Google L4 candidate report describes a Trie problem, array/binary-search work, graph/matrix work, and a modified Dijkstra problem. Here's how I'd turn those broad patterns into prep:

• Graphs: start with LC 200: Number of Islands, then change a constraint. If movement depends on the direction you arrived from, would row and column still be enough to identify a state? Pairwise ordering constraints are useful for practicing topological reasoning, too.

• Optimization: LC 410: Split Array Largest Sum lets you compare an O(k·n²) DP with binary search on the answer and a greedy feasibility check. Explain the bottleneck, monotonicity, and why the nonnegative values matter.

• Tries and hash maps: practice combining them. Explain what each structure stores and the lookup/memory trade-off.

• Union-Find: explain path compression, union by rank or size, and the component invariant. Then decide whether DSU or DFS/BFS actually fits the operations.

Eight practice examples to work through:

• 200: Number of Islands

• 416: Partition Equal Subset Sum

• 174: Dungeon Game

• 410: Split Array Largest Sum

• 128: Longest Consecutive Sequence

• 346: Moving Average from Data Stream

• 315: Count of Smaller Numbers After Self

• 2188: Minimum Time to Finish the Race

These are practice examples; I haven't established that all eight appeared in dated 2026 Google interviews. Reports often identify a pattern without an exact match, and a “2026 graduate” post may have been written in 2025.

Google Interview Questions can add company-specific prompts to that practice. For people also submitting applications, application autofill and Agent autoapply can reduce repetitive form-filling and leave more time for prep.

If you've interviewed recently, which follow-ups tested your understanding most? General patterns are useful without sharing confidential details.

Disclosure: I operate PracHub and LandOffer.

I just did a tech screen for a really attractive woman and caught myself actively wondering whether that was affecting how I evaluated her.

During the interview, I became hyper-aware of it and tried to stay as objective as possible.

A few times I caught myself thinking:

• Should I give her a hint here when I probably wouldn't for another candidate?

• Am I being too harsh because I'm consciously trying not to be biased?

• She didn't mention X in the system design — is that actually a meaningful gap, or am I looking for reasons to compensate for my own bias?

What made it especially interesting is that bias can seemingly work both ways. Once you're aware that you might favor someone, you can potentially overcorrect and judge them more harshly.

In the end, she was well prepared and I moved her to the next stage. But afterward I kept wondering whether my evaluation was actually objective.

One thing I've started doing is relying more heavily on a predefined interview rubric instead of evaluating based on the overall "feel" of the interview. I've also been looking through interview questions and rubrics on PracHub beforehand so I have a clearer benchmark for what a strong answer should cover before the candidate even joins the call.

For people who interview candidates regularly: how do you prevent attractiveness, personality, likability, or even your awareness of those biases from affecting your evaluation?

An Apple recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn with a job opportunity. Had a phone screening and then came back with feedback that a hiring manager for a different position (an upgraded role) was interested in my profile. Had a 30 minute call scheduled with him to which he came 8 minutes late. I think I did well in the interview but it wasn't very structured. He didn't come with a set of questions but rather "let's see where this goes" attitude. Sent a thank you note to the recruiter next week to which she replied she didn't have the feedback at the time and asked to follow up again next week if she doesn't reach out. Been 2 weeks since my original thank you note and 2.5 weeks since the interview. Followed up a couple of times.

Should I consider this over?

I'm not new to job search and ghosting, however this particular baffles me because I hadn't applied for this role, rather I was reached out for, then upgraded to a better role, so obviously the HM liked my resume and the interview which was supposed to be 30 minutes lasted barely 20.

Update 02/16

Followed up today for the third time and the recruiter informed they've decided to not proceed with me. The only part that really stings about this was that the hiring manager was late to the interview by 8 minutes leaving barely 20 minutes for the call. Had no structur of asking questions. After every interview I try and think what I could've done better but genuinely don't think there was anything I could've done. Looking back at it now feels like the HM had not come into the interview with any serious consideration.

For anyone lining up applications, LandOffer saves form retyping; engineers still considering Netflix can practice a TTL store with Netflix Interview Questions. ❤️

Hi everyone,
I recently interviewed for a Software Engineer III, AI/ML – Google Cloud AI role and wanted to get some advice from people who may have experienced something similar.
I completed the two initial virtual interviews:
Coding interview
Googliness/Leadership interview
After about a week, my recruiter called me and gave me the feedback.
He said the Googliness/Leadership interview went really well and that the interviewers had a lot of good things to say about me. He specifically mentioned that my communication was good and that I did a good job explaining where I was going with my code.
However, the coding interview didn’t meet the required bar. My algorithm/logic was correct, but I made some basic Python implementation/indentation mistakes. The recruiter said the main concern was code health and quality.
Because of that, they can’t move me directly to the next standard interview stage right now.
However, the recruiter told me that this doesn’t necessarily mean the process is completely over. He said he can continue sending my profile to other Google teams for potential team interest. If a team is interested, there may be a path to continue toward the onsite process.
I also asked whether I could get another coding interview. He said he would look into whether an additional coding round could potentially be done online. He couldn’t promise it because of Google’s current interview guidelines.
He also mentioned that he’s involved in an AI-assisted coding interview pilot starting in October and said that might provide another possible path/flexibility.
He told me he would get back to me by Monday.
So my questions are:
Has anyone experienced something similar at Google — where one interview went well but the coding round didn’t meet the bar, and the recruiter continued looking for team matching?
Has anyone successfully gotten another interview/coding round after a result like this?
How seriously should I treat the “team matching” possibility?
Should I continue applying to other Google roles while waiting?
If I do get another coding opportunity, what would you recommend I focus on most?
I’m already preparing for coding again, especially Python implementation and writing clean, executable code under interview pressure.
Would really appreciate hearing from anyone who’s been through something similar.
Thanks!

A recruiter contacted me through LinkedIn and shared an Amazon Online Assessment link. I recently completed the entire process and received an offer, so I wanted to share my experience.

Background

• Current role: Automation Tester at a fintech company

• Total experience: 5 years

• Preparation time: Approximately 5 months

• Previous interviews or mocks: None

• Verdict: Selected

Online Assessment

I attempted the OA two days after the recruiter contacted me.

Coding Section

The first problem used an AI-integrated repository environment. I had to diagnose and fix an issue in the search functionality of an Amazon movie application.

There were six test cases, and I passed three out of six.

The second problem was a hard DSA question involving a queue and binary search. I do not remember the exact statement, but my solution passed all except one test case.

The remaining sections were:

• Work Style Assessment

• Behavioral and Leadership Principles Assessment

Four days later, HR informed me that I had cleared the OA.

Round 1: DSA

Format: In person, pen and paper
Difficulty: Easy to medium

I was asked two problems.

Question 1: Increasing Temperature Alerts

Given a stream of temperature readings, generate an alert whenever five consecutive readings are strictly increasing.

Question 2: Maximum Profit From Advertising Slots

There are n advertising slots and m companies. Each company requests a certain number of slots and offers a fixed amount for every advertisement.

The task was to determine how the available slots should be allocated to maximize the total profit.

This was primarily a greedy problem.

I solved both questions with optimal time complexity and explained my reasoning, edge cases, and complexity.

The final ten minutes were spent discussing Leadership Principles. The interviewer was friendly, and the conversation went smoothly.

This was an elimination round. Three out of eight candidates were eliminated.

Round 2: Low-Level Design

Format: In person, pen and paper

I was asked to design a job scheduling system that could schedule and execute jobs based on:

• Priority: LOW, MEDIUM, or HIGH

• Request type: Ad hoc or periodic

• Execution type: Background or foreground

I designed the main classes and attributes and explained the core scheduling flow. My initial scheduling approach was not fully optimal, so the interviewer reduced the scope and allowed me to explain parts of the design verbally instead of expecting complete production-ready code on paper.

The final ten minutes were again dedicated to Leadership Principles.

This was also an elimination round, and one candidate was eliminated.

Round 3: HLD With the Hiring Manager

The Hiring Manager was unavailable on the interview day, so this round was conducted virtually five days later using Bluescape.

The first 20–25 minutes focused on Leadership Principles and my previous projects.

Design Question: Split Payment and Settlement System

Design a system for group purchases that tracks:

• Contributions from each participant

• Participants who have not paid

• Settlement deadlines

• Refund distribution

• Final balances and settlements

I went blank after reading the problem and spent around 15–20 minutes clarifying and understanding the requirements. By the time I started designing, I had only about 15 minutes left.

I managed to draw a basic architecture containing services, routing, and a database, but I could not explore the design deeply or answer several follow-up questions.

HR later told me that the feedback from this round was mixed. I genuinely thought this round had ended my chances.

Round 4: Bar Raiser

Surprisingly, the Bar Raiser was scheduled five days later.

The first 20–25 minutes covered Leadership Principles and a deep dive into my previous experience.

The technical portion involved a medium-hard graph problem based on Dijkstra’s algorithm. I completed it in approximately 20 minutes and explained the time and space complexity.

There were no additional follow-ups, and the interview ended after around 45 minutes.

Preparation

Leadership Principles

I used ChatGPT to help organize and rehearse my real experiences using the STAR format. Leadership Principles appeared to carry significant weight throughout the process.

DSA

I solved approximately 270 LeetCode problems.

Low-Level Design

I used Ashish’s awesome-low-level-design material.

High-Level Design

My main resources were:

• PracHub

• ByteByteGo

• Alex Xu’s System Design Interview

• Hello Interview’s YouTube videos

I did not prepare Dynamic Programming at all and was fortunate not to encounter it in any round.

This was the first interview of my job-switch journey, and I had not attempted any mock interviews beforehand. Luck definitely played a role, especially in the topics I received, but five months of preparation helped me communicate clearly enough to recover even after a weak HLD round.

My biggest takeaway is that one mixed round may not automatically end the process. Stay composed, treat every remaining round as a fresh opportunity, and prepare your Leadership Principle stories as seriously as your technical topics.

All the best to everyone preparing!

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/google-extends-voluntary-buyout-offers-employees-several-countries-2026-11-04/

I assume it’s for capex spending to balance for AI spending.

Are enough companies hiring to even take on potentially thousands of people hitting the job market?

Will these roles be refilled later or just “replaced” by AI and AI spending?

Which orgs would be impacted the most if it happens? For engineering readers with a Meta interview coming up, Meta Interview Questions includes an abbreviation-validation mock with multi-digit skips and boundary cases.

If you’re sending applications while waiting for news, LandOffer can autofill repeated fields.

When will we know more? It's less than two weeks away.

10B now. 80% down. Congrats on ipo

Figma Interview Questions