Participated in an on-campus interview for a 30-minute technical interview. I was asked to find the first duplicated character in a string.

Moved on to the on-site interview in Pleasanton. There were 5 rounds of interviews: 4 technical and 1 informal. During the informal round, I asked members of Generation Workday (a group of recent college graduates working there) about anything I wanted to know about Workday.

Each technical interview was 45 minutes long and one-on-one. They asked me string questions, array questions, and tree search questions.

Generally, the interviews weren't too bad, and they were very helpful with hints. It was only the last question that really stumped me because I had never been asked something like that. I've placed it as the one interview question I had below.

Advice: Go over DFS, BFS, string, and array problems.

Consider Google's autofill functionality. Currently, the way we've implemented it is that after every letter, a request is sent to the server to find all valid possibilities of what the word could be. For example, if we're searching for 'hello', after typing 'h', a request is sent. Then, upon typing 'e', another request is sent.

The number of valid possibilities becomes smaller as we type more of the word. The current model of sending a server request after each keystroke is quite expensive. Therefore, what algorithm would you use to limit the number of server requests sent while still maintaining autofill functionality (meaning it appears rapid to the user and doesn't stall)?