SAP Developer, Palo Alto, Jan 2020

I applied through the company website on January 7, 2020. Shortly after, I received an email from a recruiter to schedule a phone screen.

Phone Screen (45 min Skype call with code share link):
This round was with an engineer from the software development team who had about 4 years of experience. We started with an ice breaker where I had to tell them about myself, followed by a discussion about my last project. For coding, I was asked two specific questions:

• Given a list of words and a string as input, I needed to identify if that string could be made from the given list of words. The challenge included frequency constraints; for example, list_of_words = [“what”, “is”, “San Francisco”, “SAP”, “Job”], string – where is SAP located should return False. If a word appeared twice in the string but only once in the list_of_words, it should also return False.
• The second question required me to find the minimum distance of every letter in a given word from a specified alphabet. For example, for word = “sustainable” and alphabet = “a”, the expected output was [3,2,1,0,1,1,0,1,2,3].

I successfully cleared the phone screen and received an invitation for an onsite interview a week later.

Final Onsite Interview:
The onsite consisted of three distinct rounds: two technical interviews focusing on coding and system concepts, and a final behavioral interview with a hiring manager.

Round 1 (approx. 55 minutes):
This round covered a mix of topics and questions:

• Tell me about yourself.
• What are Classes and objects?
• What is the use of the final keyword in Java?
• What are JRE and JVM?
• Explain your last project, including any problems you faced.
• Coding Question: Two Sum.
• Coding Question: Design an LRU Cache.

Round 2 (approx. 45 minutes):
This round began with questions about my projects listed on my resume and challenges I had encountered. Following this, I was given a coding question:

• Design a stack that supports a find min feature along with regular push and pop operations, with the constraint that the complexity of all these operations should be O(1).

Round 3 (30 minutes with hiring manager):
This round was more conversational. The manager and I chatted about how the day was going and they explained details about the team and the work. They inquired about my future goals, how I resolve conflicts with teammates (asking for specific examples), and my expectations for the role.

Despite what I felt was a strong performance, I received a rejection three weeks later. This was, in my opinion, the best interview I’ve given, having correctly answered all coding questions and Java-specific questions. I was quite confident about the outcome, so this rejection, my second that week, was disappointing. I am hopeful that next time will be my time.