The recruiter contacted me through linkedIn and I responded. Took a while to schedule the interview and for the second time I had a lousy interviewer. The interviewer gave me a problem and then when I re-stated the problem and the solution she went with it and once I coded it said there were additional constraints to the problem that she had not quoted before and kept modifying the problem statement even up until calculating the time complexity of the problem. How do you solve a problem that you don't define until the end of the interview time? She seemed very inexperienced and also lacked language / communication skills. The previous time the interviewer seemed still groggy at 10 am.
Please vet your interviewers!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a chessboard determine if a given black or white piece in a cell is alive / dead. An item is defined alive if it has at least one non-opposite colored or blank neighbor. That was the original question. This is how it morphed over the interview:
* The diagonal neighbors don't matter to determine if a piece is alive or dead.
* There need not be just 16 pieces of black or white. There can be an arbitrary number of black or white pieces.
* If a piece is surrounded by the opposite color in 3 sides, but the 4th side of the same color but is again surrounded by opposite color, then that's still considered dead. (why did you not say this to begin with?!) But it is alive if one of them is blank.
* And while calculating the time complexity - she adds, the board can be filled with all black and say one white in the middle or vice versa. How is that a chessboard?! and why are you telling that at minute 45. If we had continued the interview wonder what other additional missing conditions about the problem she would have added that she forgot.
The interview lasted about a day, with 5 different interviewers. For each section, the technical questions took most of the part. They also showed me their office in Toronto, which was nice
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What was the most difficult problem you solved during your last job?
it was difficult. lengthy dsa questions. design was ok. needs nice preperation. googlyness also needs preperation. it was difficult. lengthy dsa questions. design was ok. needs nice preperation. googlyness also needs preperation.
One of the interviewer seemed disintered about core tack and focused on AI only. No techinical project wer considered ven if they were highly rated by peers an the community
