First phone interview, which didn't go well. First question was about linked list traversal finding a node towards the tail. The algorithm I gave them ran in O(n), then they said it wasn't good enough, so I thought about reversing it and counting from the tail. That took up too much s...pace complexity so I was baffled for a while because I thought they wanted a much more efficient algorithm. Turns out they just wanted two pointers to traverse, which would only be faster than my original algorithm by a constant amount. I failed to see why that would make that much of a difference. Second question was about Comparable vs Comparator. I NEVER used comparator during my years using Java so I couldn't answer that one. Third question was finding duplicates in an array. Create another array to keep track of the repetitions, done. Last question was the hardest - determining the angle between an hour hand and minute hand on a clock. I wasn't expecting a mathematical type question, plus I never really bothered to learn how an analog clock works that well anyway. I took a long time - and screwed up the formula for it, but basically it was dividing the degrees of each quadrant and applying what I know about hours and minutes to it. Didn't do that well - cause clocks aren't exactly my area of expertise.

Loop — 4 rounds, all on the same day Round 1 — Coding (DSA) Interviewer was a senior SDE, very friendly. Warm-up + behavioral: "Tell me about a time you took ownership of something outside your responsibilities." Main question: Given a list of meeting intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms required. I used a heap. He then asked a follow-up: what if meetings could be reassigned to minimize total idle time? We discussed approaches but didn't fully code it. He cared a lot about how I talked through edge cases out loud. Round 2 — Coding + Problem Solving LP question: "Describe a situation where you disagreed with a teammate." Coding: LRU Cache implementation from scratch. I used a hashmap + doubly linked list. He pushed on thread-safety and what happens at capacity 0. Round 3 — Behavioral (Bar Raiser) This was the toughest round — no coding, all Leadership Principles, very deep STAR-format probing. Questions I got: "Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned." "A time you had to deliver something with a tight deadline and limited information." The bar raiser kept drilling: "What was your specific contribution?" "What would you do differently?" "What data did you use?" Have 6–8 strong stories ready with metrics. Round 4 — Low-Level Design Design: Design a parking lot system (classes, vehicle types, spot allocation, pricing). Then he asked me to code the findSpot() and releaseSpot() methods.