VMWare | New Grad | Palo Alto | Feb

I interviewed for a New Grad Performance Engineering position at VMWare in Palo Alto, California in February .

Phone Interview

• Validate a JSON string without any libraries.
• Print all palindromic substrings of a given string.
• Spiral matrix

Onsite Round 1

• Given a sentence as a string, reverse the locations of each word. (Similar to the Leetcode problem "Reverse Words in a String II")
• Do the same question as above, but given a char array instead of a string.
• Find k closest points to the origin.
• Two sum

Round 2

• Sort a stack using recursion. I mentioned that it would take a minimum of O(n^2) time if done recursively. I was stuck wondering why recursion was necessary when we could do it in O(nlogn) time with extra space. However, the interviewer wanted a recursive solution, and I was unable to provide one.
• Rotate array. (Similar to the Leetcode problem "Rotate Array")
• Questions about my resume. One project was not well-revised, and the interviewer noticed something about it.
• How to avoid running all test cases when pushing an update to a branch. Currently, if we push a small change, all tests are run, and the code is built. Instead, we should only run the tests affected by the change, making the build faster. How to do it?
  • I suggested building a dependency graph. However, the interviewer asked if there was a machine learning solution.

Round 3

• This round focused on OS concepts. I had not reviewed them well.
• How a process works.
• What happens when "ls -l" is run? This involved explaining interactions with the kernel, disk, network interfaces, memory access, etc.
• Difference between a process and a thread.
• Check if 10000 servers have the same time with an error percentage of up to 1 minute. Solution: Recursively call a command to get the time using sshpas.
• What happens when the "kill" command is run? The interviewer expected me to mention interrupts.

Round 4

• Number of islands
• Validate binary search tree.
• Questions about my resume, including challenges in a project.