Minimum Cost to Connect Sticks

"Overall, the interview process was structured and covered a good mix of DSA, software engineering practices, system design, and behavioral/team-fit discussions. I went through five rounds, and the difficulty was reasonable but the questions were varied and required adapting quickly between problem-solving and design-oriented discussions. The DSA rounds went well, particularly because the problems tested both fundamentals and the ability to reason through domain-specific constraints. The system design round was the highlight for me. I enjoyed discussing the bottlenecks in the initial design, reasoning about the 50,000 RPS traffic spike and limited inventory, and iterating toward a scalable solution. The hiring manager round was also a good experience because it went beyond standard behavioral questions and involved a detailed discussion of my past work, architecture decisions, database migration considerations, and how I would use AI tools while solving engineering problems. One thing I found challenging was that the software engineering practices round was more DSA-focused than I had expected, so there was less emphasis on software design/practices than I had anticipated. Overall, though, the process was positive and I received encouraging feedback throughout."