Akamai | SSE | Ghosted
Summary
I interviewed for a Staff Software Engineer position at Akamai, where I successfully solved one DSA problem and explained the approach for another. Despite positive feedback, I was ultimately ghosted and received a rejection.
Full Experience
Directly got a call to schedule interview (without any prior contact from HR about the role). I got to know about the role from their careers page.
Round - 1 (DSA)
1. Similar question to this one: https://leetcode.com/problems/remove-stones-to-minimize-the-total/description
2. The question was: Given a string, find the minimum length substring that can be removed to make the remaining string have all unique characters (with freq. 1).
I solved the first one passing all the test cases and as time was not much, I gave half writen code for 2nd one but explained the approach.
I also got a feedback at last from the interviewer that I had good problem solving skills and thinking capability :D
I called HR after 2 days. No response and got a rejection mail in a few minutes. I was really hoping I would get to work remotely but everyone faces a dumb HR once in their life.
Interview Questions (2)
Remove Stones to Minimize the Total
You are given a 0-indexed integer array piles where piles[i] represents the number of stones in the i-th pile, and an integer k. You are also given an integer k, which represents the number of operations you can perform. In one operation, you can choose any pile piles[i] and remove floor(piles[i] / 2) stones from it. Return the minimum total number of stones remaining after performing k operations.
Minimum Length Substring to Remove for Unique Characters
Given a string, find the minimum length substring that can be removed to make the remaining string have all unique characters (with freq. 1).