Archive of tech interview questions of Google, Amazon, FB, Samsung and et al.

https://github.com/twowaits/SDE-Interview-Questions/

by ramoji564 • 6 years ago

70 68 6 years ago

github.com

Bahamut• 6 years ago

Fixing grammar, typos and formatting only is complete non-sense. And non-sense is highly discouraged.

This comment in the README is pretty shitty - those sorts of fixes are still valuable.

slymon99• 6 years ago

this is presumably a response to the flood of trivial hacktober PR's that are all one line README changes that add little value

passerby1• 6 years ago

Valuable where exactly. It's good that that's defined clearly in readme at least so that contributors don't waste time. And value of such contributions are defined by project itself and those responsible for it. PS I can imagine rules like that to appear in some opensource projects after tha recent pandemic of the "awesome project" PRs.

philjackson• 6 years ago

https://github.com/twowaits/SDE-Interview-Questions/pull/152...

erhk• 6 years ago

Whenever you post an interview question online your interviewers life get a little bit harder. These questions get blacklisted for being associated with their company and they then have to synthesize a new question

tudelo• 6 years ago

On the other hand, some of the questions can be rather interesting to solve. I also notice there are just a few patterns/techniques that you can use to solve them so the questions themselves do not seem all that important.

jciochon• 6 years ago

Which patterns and techniques are you referring to, in particular?

justaguy88• 6 years ago

Perhaps they should ask questions relevant to the job then.

fizixer• 6 years ago

Which is a good thing right?

All questions and their solutions should be exposed, so big tech can get to work on fixing their interview process?

sumtechguy• 6 years ago

Not a bad idea. The idea of 'fizzbuzz' was to just filter out the total unable to do it at all people. Not to filter for people who can do coding interviews. Honestly, that these questions are out there and people study for them make an interviewers life easier. 'Oh you saw this problem online great! explain why it works'. It cuts through a lot of gruff. Had it happen a few times with the particular problem I like to use. If they can read cracking the coding interview and understand the problems in it and explain them back you are half way there!

copperx• 6 years ago

I don't see anything wrong with that.

kadoban• 6 years ago

They're fun problems though typically.

Don't problems have to be rotated eventually anyway? You'd think otherwise there would be secret silos of problems and those in the know will have much better results than anyone else.

21eleven5• 6 years ago

I feel like this is an often overlooked fact about these programming exercises, once you get into solving them they are surprisingly fun.

visarga2• 6 years ago

I'm just going to use this list to steal a problem for my interviews.

It's hard to find a problem that is good at selecting candidates yet doable in 30-60 minutes and different from the problems other colleagues use in their interviews. Most problems are either too difficult or too easy.

newbie578• 6 years ago

While I do feel sorry them, the game is broken and we cannot just sit idle by.

I am all supportive of people trying to game these big companies. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

volkk• 6 years ago

by stupid prizes you mean a gigantic salary that no other company can match?

klodolph2• 6 years ago

The blacklist can only get so long. There is a bank of questions but they only really get blacklisted if a bunch of candidates show up and they’ve obviously memorized an answer to it. Or if it shows up in a high-profile place. Like, if your question is the first question in a new edition of “Cracking the Coding Interview” it will probably get dropped.

I think individual questions that got posted would be blacklisted ten years ago. But nowadays, there are so many people doing interviews and such a large bank of questions (public and otherwise) that the blacklist isn’t so big a deal. Because there are so many vetted questions to ask, you can pick one and not worry to hard candidates may have done drills using that specific question. And if they have, you can have a second question on standby.

As an interviewer, I’m happy to see questions posted. You get to see people share their experiences answering it and make the question better, rephrase things to be less ambiguous or misleading, maybe tweak some wording that trips up non-native speakers, or decide that people have a bad experience answering it and you should drop the question. As an interviewer, I also ask questions from the blacklist. I’m not gonna say something arrogant like “I can tell” if you knew the question ahead of time, but my job as interviewer is to get the best information about you that I can to the hiring committee, and balancing that with the goal of giving you a pleasant enough experience during the interview that you want to accept an offer. Trying to catch cheaters is not my top priority.

All of this being colored by the facts that the interview process itself is a bit traumatic and people running interviews often don’t run them well.

manfredo2• 6 years ago

The way some companies work is that there's a set list of question archetypes, but interviewers come up with their own methods of presenting the problem. For example, a seam carving problem might get presented as finding a horizon in an image. I would often present the same problem as finding a pass through a mountain range given a height map of the terrain.

Also, it's possible for interviewers to detect candidates who study the problem beforehand. A couple questions at Dropbox were spread online for years, and it would become clear which candidates read up on those questions online. Some would propose, without prompting, solutions to older iterations of the interview question.

drpgq• 6 years ago

Everything is an arms race

danbmil99• 6 years ago

What's the point of hiding the interview questions? What does the hiring company care whether the applicant learned that years ago or crammed for it recently?

underwater• 6 years ago

I've had to stop interviewees and if they've seen a question before - it's pretty obvious when they have.

As an interviewer you then have to scrap that question and ask a new question on the fly. This is bad for the candidate because there is now less time and it might be a question the interviewer is less comfortable asking.

jasonpeacock• 6 years ago

When this happens, don't switch questions, ask the candidate to teach the solution to you.

e.g. Why is this the right solution? Why not another approach? What are the tradeoffs? Where does this solution fail?

invalidusernam3• 6 years ago

I've applied for positions at companies that ask these kind of questions, when the actual job is fixing CSS issues and making basic CRUD applications.

Interviews should be a balance between testing problem solving, ability to learn, and knowledge that applies to the actual job they would be doing.

sidchilling2• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, interviews, as they are currently, are more an indicator of preparation rather than job performance. It’s a game; you gotta play it.

speedgoose4• 6 years ago

You don't have to in Europe.

lmarcos2• 6 years ago

You gotta play it.

If you want a job in those companies, sure. But if you want a decent job in a decent software company, you don't have to go through all that show. There are companies that don't ask that sort of questions and instead they interview you in a sane manner (they ask about past experience, they let you talk about what you actually know... The whole interview feels like a conversation).

qppo• 6 years ago

Either end of the hiring channel is extremely noisy, recruiters work by spamming and candidates get seen by spamming. In my anecdotal experience, maybe 1 in 10 of any given job listing or applicant is worth pursuing.

These questions are a less bad way of filtering people out than others. They're not the only filters used, and others have different tradeoffs. Sometimes if you're hitting these questions it's because the other filters have already excluded you.

21eleven5• 6 years ago

That's true but then companies would have a problem where too many people still look qualified after going through rounds of interviews.

If a given company has a lot of people who want to work for it then it makes sense for that company to have people attempt very challenging programming exercises so that the org can filter the applicant pool down to the number of positions they have open.

These companies have the luxury of being able to have hiring processes that turn away perfectly good applicants that couldn't pass their tests (false negatives).

deadmutex• 6 years ago

it makes sense for that company to have people attempt very challenging programming exercises

Perhaps. I would also encourage companies to look past programming ability, and consider things like work ethic etc. I would argue that once you can do the job, reliably showing up and working hard every day has a lot of impact.

zinckiwi• 6 years ago

too many people still look qualified after going through rounds of interviews

Maybe we're not as special as we think and not just a few mythical uberengineers are qualified to do the take-something-from-here-and-put-it-there coding that is 90% of the field...

mandeepj• 6 years ago

That's true but then companies would have a problem where too many people still look qualified after going through rounds of interviews.

Be ready for a surprise. Almost anyone who can spend 3-6 months on solving every single problem at LeetCode\HackerRank can crack these so called high caliber interviews. Unfortunately, a lot of us deny to take that route

a1pulley• 6 years ago

The Google ones are wildly off—I work there as a SWE. Just review CLRS [1] until you hit minimum spanning trees, skipping starred sections like the one on matroids. Do a handful of LeetCode medium and hard questions on the way. A few weeks of study is sufficient if you've already seen this stuff in college.

Of course, I don't necessarily agree that LeetCode style questions should do the gatekeeping at Big N, but the procedure above has worked for me at three of the big companies. I'm sorry if you have dependents and need to work full-time while you study.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms

ramoji564• 6 years ago

Hi there, Can you share some questions regarding Google interviews?

21eleven5• 6 years ago

By all means, study algorithms and data structures but the idea of sourcing and studying specific "company questions" is silly and kinda unethical.

gigatexal2• 6 years ago

Apple’s missing.

decafninja4• 6 years ago

From what I've heard, Apple teams have more autonomy in how they conduct interviews for their prospective future team-mates, and (shock!) some actually will not leetcode you (correct me if wrong), or at least evaluate you very differently from say, Google or Facebook.

I think Netflix is also similar?

gigatexal2• 6 years ago

This is great! There might be hope for me yet: future data engineer at Apple some day.

ponker• 6 years ago

Once I studied a list like this and then got one of the questions in an interview. I did a good job with the theatrics of not knowing the fully correct answer and struggled through it with flashes of genius. I got the job, after a few years I couldn’t really hack it but I’m still reaping the benefits of having that name start my career.

21eleven5• 6 years ago

Unpopular opinion: solving programming riddles makes you not only a better programmer but a better all-around problem solver and thinker.

Before I could solve your average programming riddle I scoffed at them. Now that I have some experience solving them I feel like it is truly a form of mind expanding knowledge and should be valued not only in hiring but in life in general.

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

Unpopular opinion: solving programming riddles makes you not only a better programmer but a better all-around problem solver and thinker.

That's not an unpopular opinion among people who devote energy to solving programming riddles.

The need to validate one's own life choices is a common cognitive bias, if nothing else.

21eleven5• 6 years ago

While we are all biased toward seeking to validate our own choices I believe it also can be said that some choices are more effective at producing a given outcome than others.

Wazzymandias• 6 years ago

I think the problem is the industry standards and expectations for candidates. The fact that OP links an archive of interview questions is indicative of the underlying problem.

Giving a candidate a problem they haven't seen before and observing their problem solving skills and mentality doesn't sound so bad on paper. However the process has been gamified and as a result the expectations for what a candidate should know and accomplish have increased. This ends up favoring younger candidates and/or fresh grads, since on average they can expend greater time and energy into studying for these types of interviews and their algorithms & data structure courses are still fresh in their minds. A more senior candidate or a person with more responsibilities outside of work (taking care of children, parents, etc) won't be able to invest as much time into studying these types of problems. The original purpose of the interview is also obfuscated - did the candidate genuinely show good problem solving skills or did they see the question before and merely memorized the solution? As a hiring manager I've seen multiple instances of the latter.

I think the utility of spending time on these problems varies from person to person. I personally find it more useful to delve into distributed systems, cryptopgraphy, networking, or operating systems. These topics have made me a much better engineer and improved my problem solving skills, more so than programming riddles which gave me diminishing returns over time.

Archive of tech interview questions of Google, Amazon, FB, Samsung and et al.

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