A recruiter reached out to me for a specific role, and I was scheduled for the first telephonic interview. I performed decently well on the technical portion and was invited on-site to Bellevue.

The on-site interview consisted of four rounds, each 45 minutes long, plus a lunch interview.

The team mostly consisted of Asian individuals, and most of them treated me well. I struggled in the first round. The interviewer spent about 20-25 minutes explaining his team structure and how it fits into the business model. While it was good to learn this information, it took away a significant amount of time from the coding question. I'm unsure if I should have interrupted, but it backfired heavily as I couldn't finish the problem successfully.

The second round went well. It was the only round where I had a productive discussion, and I felt confident that I had performed well enough.

The third round involved a simple coding question with many follow-up questions, such as how to make the code work for any data type and handling edge cases.

The lunch interview was with the same person, who asked me a series of scenario-based questions and about best practices in software engineering.

The last interviewer was pleasant to work with; I really enjoyed talking to him, and then I was done.

Overall, I faced a good set of challenges. However, as always, I wasn't at my best or perhaps needed a better version of myself. I knew by the end of the day that I wouldn't make the cut. Perhaps next time, I guess! I'll never give up! Keep it coming!

Technical interview:

How would you count the number of 1's in an integer? The question was not as simple as this. There were a lot of follow-up questions on how I would test this function, edge cases, and different types of binary representations, etc.

On-site questions:

• Linked list - reverse ONLY from nodes begin to end (begin, end) will be integer values.
• Next right pointers. I did it with both a single queue and with two queues, q1 and q2, and swapping them. Follow-up: How do you cut down on memory?
• All positive integers on the left, negative on the other side. The follow-up was to modify it to a templated function.
• Given a string "Hello World", split all words. This was a programming session on the interviewer's computer (not a whiteboard). There will be ONLY a space as a delimiter.

If a service can be called up to a maximum of 5 times, how do you make sure it is handled? I answered "semaphores".