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Comment by carterdmorgan | Hacker News Reader

My last interview cycle I interviewed with some big names (Stripe, Square, Shopify, etc.) and was pleased that none of them asked any LeetCode style questions. All pretty practical programming stuff. Stripe had an interview where they had forked the Jackson Java library, introduced a bug, and then asked me to find and fix it. Pretty unique style, but much more applicable to the actual job of programming.

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> Stripe had an interview where they had forked the Jackson Java library, introduced a bug, and then asked me to find and fix it.

I think I would actually enjoy an interview like that.

In my most recent interviews with Apple and Amazon there were no LeetCode questions after the phone screen. Quite a change from previous experience.

What are they asking these days and what positions was this for (i.e. a senior role?)

For the Apple interviews it was all systems programming stuff, e.g. "implement mmove", "read integers off the wire preserving endianness", etc. Amazon was much more focused on behavioral stuff (i.e. their leadership principles) and system design.

This was for Amazon L6 and Apple equivalent, nothing very senior.

Really? In my Amazon interview last month for a SWE position they asked a LeetCode style question after the initial phone screen about writing a social network data structure (a directed graph) and then asked me to write a method to traverse it to n-depth.

I did have an internal referral from an SPE so it's possible my experience wasn't typical.

That's a clever interview question, but wouldn't that suffer from diffing origin/main? Or was this a in person / on screen interview with no git history?

I would say that I would hire that person if that was the solution. That said maybe repo wasn’t included in interview. (Would be even better if person figure out how to diff against a new clone)

It was an on-screen virtual interview, so while I believe they had scrubbed the Git history, you weren't allowed to look it up.

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