TikTok/Bytedance | Tech Lead Manager | Singapore | Jun [Reject]

The interview consisted of three 45-minute rounds, but I only made it to the second round. I came here because I've never had an interview where a question is asked where you can't just Google and sit there for a couple of minutes trying to understand it, and I figured that a company of this size would probably have at least one of those rounds.

Important to note that if you're interviewing for a position in Asia, you're likely to get an interviewer from GMT+8, so you'll have to deal with the time difference. Fortunately for me, I'm in Vancouver, so I managed to schedule my interviews at a reasonable time.

1st Round: I could tell that the interviewer was new/fresh to interviewing, but eager to understand where I was coming from. We went through my background, and talked a lot about international cultural differences. Realizing that time was slipping away in our 45-minute interview, we jumped into a system design question that had to do with a product topic of eventual consistency. Our interview actually ran up to 1.5 hours, mostly because of the back and forth that we had at the end, and how he kept sidetracking and asked for more insights into parts of the system, which was quite interesting and collaborative. I came out of the interview feeling alright, but positive about the experience.

2nd Round: The recruiter got back to me a week later and scheduled an interview based off my previous availabilities. Not a great start, since my availabilities change pretty frequently, though happy to have made it through regardless.

This interview was the polar opposite. The interview started late because he had to restart his computer, and he grilled me on my past for way too long, seemingly disinterested the entire time. He then tried to spin up a HackerRank link for me, but something wasn't going right on his end so he ended up starting a Feishu Doc (think Google Doc clone) and copy-pasting a Leetcode Medium based on topological sorting. By the time this started, I probably had about 15 minutes left in the interview.

I didn't actually know how to do a topological sort, but I was able to reason my way through it. The weird thing was that the interviewer was quite bullish on asking me to prove that it would work, and before I knew it, time was up before I could finish, and he cut me off.

I thanked him for his time, and received a rejection email a day later.

Overall:

Even though I learned from this (somewhat broken) interview process, I'd like to say for all of you struggling through Leetcode questions that you're not alone, even from someone working in the field and have worked at multiple places with huge distributed systems. It feels a little weird to need to keep these pattern memorization skills at the back of your mind while struggling, but if you can't beat the system you have to join them, right?