Slice

Role: SDE 2

College: Tier 1 college

Interview Date: May 23, 2023

Interview Type: Referral

Result: Rejected

Difficulty: Hard

Rounds: 1 (Coding round detailed, but typical SDE 2 process would have more)

Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms (specifically self-balancing BST, deque).

Experience:

This interview experience for an SDE 2 role at Slice, applied via referral, involved a challenging coding round.

Round 1 - Coding (90 minutes): The question asked was: "Given an array of size n, return the maximum difference of the maximum and minimum of each window of size k."

The interviewer, from the bizops team, expected an O(n) solution without explicitly stating it. The candidate initially approached with an O(n^2) brute force solution, then optimized to O(nlogn). The interviewer then requested implementation without using any libraries, specifically asking for a self-balancing binary search tree (like an AVL Tree or Red-Black Binary Search Tree).

There was initial confusion as the interviewer did not believe AVL Trees and self-balancing BSTs were the same, which took about 40 minutes to clarify. This left limited time for implementing the AVL Tree. Eventually, the candidate arrived at an O(n) solution using a deque.

Result: The candidate was rejected because it took a considerable amount of time to reach the optimal O(n) solution and they couldn't fully implement the requested solution without using inbuilt libraries.