Software Engineer Staff Interview Questions

2,548 software engineer staff interview questions shared by candidates

Interviewer forgot the question he wanted to ask.. then he tried to make statement about the question using wrong words.. The question he asked was - Create a mirror reflection of binary tree - for that he asked - "do I know what is a symmetric tree" I explained him what is symmetric tree and how I can check symmetric tree. Interviewer realized this is not the question he wanted to ask then he asked lets create symmetric (mirror) reflection of a tree. I wrote the code to create mirror reflection of the tree.. I think he remembered the answer for "Invert a binary tree" and argued with me that my code to create a mirror will overwrite left node value and did not understand I am creating new tree (mirror tree) so there is no overwrite. It took 20 minutes of worthless conversation and the interviewer still did not get the simple code I wrote in 2 minutes. The interviewer was PhD - Sr. Staff with 20+ years of experience. I felt so miserable for my luck. I think that is why Google / Facebook still are the most reputed
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Staff Software Engineer

Interviewed at LinkedIn

3.8
Feb 1, 2020

Interviewer forgot the question he wanted to ask.. then he tried to make statement about the question using wrong words.. The question he asked was - Create a mirror reflection of binary tree - for that he asked - "do I know what is a symmetric tree" I explained him what is symmetric tree and how I can check symmetric tree. Interviewer realized this is not the question he wanted to ask then he asked lets create symmetric (mirror) reflection of a tree. I wrote the code to create mirror reflection of the tree.. I think he remembered the answer for "Invert a binary tree" and argued with me that my code to create a mirror will overwrite left node value and did not understand I am creating new tree (mirror tree) so there is no overwrite. It took 20 minutes of worthless conversation and the interviewer still did not get the simple code I wrote in 2 minutes. The interviewer was PhD - Sr. Staff with 20+ years of experience. I felt so miserable for my luck. I think that is why Google / Facebook still are the most reputed

Coding challenge, easy difficulty, but you need to pay attention to the edge cases. They say you don't need to necessarily have fully functional code, but for this challenge it should have been an easy completion. Optimizing for O(n) was not the goal, just learning my thought process along the way. I'm not supplying specifics here because the question was easy for anybody who has spent significant time practicing LeetCode, which I didn't..
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Staff Software Engineer

Interviewed at Juniper Square

4
Mar 19, 2023

Coding challenge, easy difficulty, but you need to pay attention to the edge cases. They say you don't need to necessarily have fully functional code, but for this challenge it should have been an easy completion. Optimizing for O(n) was not the goal, just learning my thought process along the way. I'm not supplying specifics here because the question was easy for anybody who has spent significant time practicing LeetCode, which I didn't..

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