The first round phone screen asked for an introduction and an interesting project on my resume. I guess my project was not interesting enough.

I was interrupted and the interviewer moved on to coding problems suddenly. All of which made it look like it was just a process; they don't really care about what it was as long as you described it cheerfully.

The first question was to design a "Subway" class that has a method to get the average passing time between two stations in a time complexity of O(1). The interviewer presented it as a system design question and talked about consuming other objects as well. When I got stuck, he randomly hinted me with a checkIn(int id, string stationName, int t) method that I could design first.

After the interview, I googled and it appeared to be LeetCode #1396, but he described it in a much more complex and confusing way. There's no chance a candidate would understand his hint if they hadn't done the same problem before.

The second question was more of a traditional coding problem, as I had expected. I later googled it; it's similar to "Flatten a Multilevel Doubly Linked List" (#430).

It was hard for a new grad, not to mention for a candidate who doesn't have a CS background. This company doesn't welcome non-CS candidates, despite their emphasis on diversity. The whole diversity thing is a fraud. They just want a LeetCode machine who has at least done/memorized 500+ medium-hard problems and can talk code. Seriously, no wonder most of the posts are no-offers.

Lastly, don't apply if you haven't done/memorized much of LeetCode. Otherwise, it will only lead to humiliation.

Introduction

Interesting project

System design

Flatten multilevel linked list