Question

Bytedance | Interview experiences | Set - 1 | 2022

Answer 1

Technical Round 1:

 

• An easy Coding Problem which I don't recall now.
• Questions on concepts of Rest APIs, HTTP v/s HTTPS, and some similar web tech related questions.

 

Technical Round 2:

 

• Coding Problem: Find the first common node in two intersecting linkedlists.
  Same as https://leetcode.com/problems/intersection-of-two-linked-lists/.
  I had a little bug in my code initially in handling the no intersection case, but I was able to identify and correct it myself so the interviewer liked that.
• Then there were many questions on varying topics:
  • Threads and processes
  • Difference between concurrency and parallelism
  • Network Architecture layers
  • Different error codes on internet, what those codes mean, etc.
• He also asked me if I have experience of Concurrent programming, Functional programming, Design Patterns. To which I clearly said NO.

 

PS: I wasn't expecting anything much after this round since I immediately NO to some questions. When I was interviewing with the company I wasn't sure if I really want to join them thus I gave all interviews with somewhat casual attitude. That is also the reason I could easily say no to those questions.

 

Technical Round 3:

 

• Coding Problem: A dictionary based problem.
  Design a dictionary to search words with exactly one character modified of the original word given.
  Implement buildDict and search functions.
  I proposed two solutions -
  i) Using hashmap to store the words
  ii) Using Trie to store the words (for space optimisation)
  To save time, I coded the Hashmap solution (with the interviewer's consent). I designed the class and implemented above 2 functions.
• He asked me many follow up questions on the coding problem. If there is such a system existing what would you do to handle very large number of users? How would you handle large number of incoming search requests? and so on.
• Then we also discussed some System Design concepts like Horizontal Scaling, Load balancers, etc. (mostly in regards to scaling the above system)
• And some networking related questions.

 

My thoughts/tips on the process:

 

1. There was a clarity on what the process looks like which was good, and the process was comparitively fast as well.
2. There was no managerial round/interaction which I didn't like. All interviews were taken by young engineers and no leadership was involved, which I didn't like personally. I like managerial rounds because it gives an idea of senior leadership of the company which also helps in making a final decision on candidate's side to join the company or not.
3. Sometimes you might have to clarify a question 2 or 3 times because the interviewers are often not fluent with English.
4. A good understanding of CS fundamentals is also important.