Software Engineer · Phone Screen · Coding

Netflix — Software Engineer ❌ Failed

Level: Unknown Level

Round: Phone Screen · Type: Coding · Difficulty: 5/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Unfriendly

Topics: Topological Sort, Graph Algorithms, Data Structures, Follow-up Questions

Location: Los Gatos, CA

Interview date: 2025-08-15

Got offer: False

Summary

I had a technical phone screen with two interviewers. One interviewer shadowed the other. There were technical issues with the coding environment, which made the interview more challenging.

Details

I had a technical phone screen with two interviewers; one was shadowing. The interviewer seemed inexperienced, as we spent five minutes trying to switch coding languages in the shared environment. The actual coding question was a topological sort. I was surprised since I thought topological sort was usually asked in onsite interviews.

Unexpectedly, the coding environment had no auto syntax check. I wasn't getting any error messages even when I hadn't imported necessary libraries or misspelled variable names. I asked the interviewer about it, but he said syntax check should be enabled. I essentially had to write the code blindly. When I ran the test cases, there was an error about a missing variable declaration. I spent a lot of time debugging, but I couldn't find the issue. The shadowing interviewer stepped in and found that I had missed a bracket in my loop. It was a simple typo, but syntax check would have caught it immediately.

Because of the time lost debugging, there wasn't enough time for me to fully implement the follow-up question, so I just described my approach. The follow-up question involved optimizing course selection for each semester given available courses. After the interview, I consulted ChatGPT, which suggested a bitmap + dynamic programming approach.

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