Interview Questions

Ekta M. - "I would start with some clarifying questions like: Is there a deadline when all these needs to be updated by? Do we have upgrade scripts ready? When do we have change freeze? Once I have these few clarifying answers I would start planning: I would meet with all the teams involved in the upgrades Document any resources downtime during the upgrade create a risk registry along with mitigation plan Roll back plan create a phased rollout plan based on deadline Post upgrade get a"See full answer

Lavesh D. - "Approach - Check the product scope - social network, IG, Whatsapp, etc. Check how the metric is measured and if there are shortcomings or changes in the approach Eliminate obvious reasons like seasonality, external events, analytical pipeline changes, etc. Look for internal product changes or issues In case the hypothesis falls short, find ways to triangulate the issue PS - A real interview may not need so many questions to be asked. I am just listing down questions to validate or rej"See full answer

Ajay P. - "Designing an evaluation framework for ads ranking is crucial for optimizing the effectiveness and relevance of ads displayed to users. Here's a comprehensive framework that you can use: Define Objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):** \\Click-Through Rate (CTR):\\ The ratio of clicks to impressions, indicating the effectiveness of an ad in attracting user attention. \\Conversion Rate:\\ The ratio of conversions (e.g., sign-ups, purchases) to clicks, measuring how well"See full answer

Dhruv M. - "I was assigned to a project where the executive team said they wanted to "improve customer satisfaction" but provided no specific metrics, target outcomes, or scope. The initial brief was vague; they mentioned customer complaints were increasing, but hadn't quantified the problem or identified which customer segments or processes were involved. My responsibility was to lead the analysis and develop a solution; however, first, I needed to transform this ambiguous directive into a clearly defined"See full answer

R A. - "Company Mission: Make video communication frictionless Product: Zoom is a telecommunications tool used by companies and individuals to interact with one another. It has a freemium business model i.e. it provides some basic features to its users for free and premium features for a subscription. Features: Video and audio interactions. Built-in collaboration features. End-to-end encryption for all meetings. Recording and transcripts. Streamlined calendaring. User Base: "See full answer

Yeshwanth D. - "Was this for an entry level engineer role?"See full answer

Umang S. - "Just a bit of context on what could be a risk in Product or Software Development. We talk about the Scope, Quality, and Time Triangle. IMHO the only variables that can matter and can pose risk are these. Try to form an answer where you used the Effort, Value, Risk framework to quantify the risk. The answer can be similar to short term sacrifices for long term gains, as you do take in mind the risk the short term sacrifices pose. Situation - I was leading the team to complete an overhaul of the"See full answer

Shashank S. - "Prioritizing competing features involves evaluating and comparing different features to determine which ones to implement first, based on their relative importance, value, and impact on the product and users. Here are some steps to help prioritize competing features: Define the goals and objectives: Identify the product's overall goals, target audience, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This will help you understand what features are most important to achieve these goals. **Gather"See full answer

Jaehyuk C. - "Q: What ad system do we have (to clarify the limitation of the ads systems and its scope)? -> need context of the advertisement. What signals of ads do we have? pictures, texts, comments, video, etc. What is daily active users on the system? (scalability) Do we need taking actions after detecting it? (further process is needed?) what device do we have ad system? PC, mobile, etc. FR: detect the weapon signals (classification) alert after weapon is detected identify the us"See full answer

Aabid S. - "I work at a startup that makes software for Law Enforcement and the FBI. Our product analyzes calls being made by prison inmates and "listens" for predictors of violence and criminal behavior. Our clients are some of the top state prisons in the country. Recently one of the largest states in the country decided to evaluate our product for their prison system. I demo'd the product to the officers and they seemed to like everything. During the presentation they asked us if the product was ADA com"See full answer

Anonymous Mongoose - "The below system design addresses the requirements for a scalable distributed onboarding service, focusing on robust data validation, asynchronous processing, real-time aggregation, and efficient querying of metadata. Core Principles: Asynchronous Processing: Decouple components to ensure high throughput and responsiveness. Scalability & Elasticity: Utilize technologies that can scale horizontally to handle varying loads. Data Durability & Integrity: Ensure no data l"See full answer

Bipin R. - "As you know, this is the most important question for any interview. Here is a structure I like to follow, Start with 'I'm currently a SDE/PM/TPM etc with XYZ company.... ' Mention how you got into PM/TPM/SDE field (explaining your journey) Mention 1 or 2 accomplishments Mention what you do outside work (blogging, volunteer etc) Share why are you looking for a new role Ask the interviewer if they have any questions or will like to dive deep into any of your experience"See full answer

Adam L. - "Discussed: Requirements of the system: latency language modality (assume keyboard typing) availability of data (assume cold start) success metric (accuracy of next word predicted?, or minimize false positives? -> accuracy to start) Data collection and processing: design ethical user experiments to collect typed out data design a simple tokenization strategy (word level encoding, character level encoding, byte-pair encodings, and discuss tradeoffs) collect data, and split"See full answer

Vijay M. - "Very well done."See full answer

KAI - "Answer: select fromcaller, count(DISTINCT tocallee) as num_calls from calls group by fromcaller having count(DISTINCT tocallee) >= 3 Setup: CREATE TABLE calls ( from_caller VARCHAR(20), to_callee VARCHAR(20) ); INSERT INTO calls (fromcaller, tocallee) VALUES ('Alice', 'Bob'), ('Charlie', 'Dave'), ('Alice', 'Frank'), ('Charlie', 'Heidi'), ('Charlie', 'Judy'); "See full answer

Praveen - "Narrow down scope with clarifying questions: Confirm that Reactions are the like, love, sad and other icons that facebook users can respond with on your post. Understand the metric: is "down" ... absolute number or is it a ratio of reactions per post? Understand the boundary conditions: Is it specific to a certain region, certain segment of users (only from new users versus active users), happening on personal posts or group posts, happening on app versus desktop/mobile etc. Under"See full answer

Yao X. - "In general, I don't think Google should go into ridesharing market at this point. (06/2020) I have 3 reasons why Google should not get into ridesharing business at this point and a exception. Reason 1: Current market With major players like Uber and Lyft occupying around 90% of the market, current ridesharing business market is already crowded. These companies have been around for 6-7 years and users already formed the user habit of using either Uber or Lyft when they need a car to go some"See full answer

Mayank M. - "Clarifying questions- Are we considering only the viewing + upload or all the services like ads, payouts etc? -- only streaming + uploads. Are we considering any specific platform like App, website or everything? --- All. Are we talking about just the tech part or should we consider the ops cost as well? ---consider everything. High level equation- Since we want to calculate the cost of running youtube for a day , we need to consider the following verticals- **Vide"See full answer

Justin G. - "Observation This is an interesting question. The solution has two heads, meaning that the user must feel less guilty AND the solution must also increase revenue towards the platform. Structure The way I would approach this involves splitting the question into sequential steps. Why are users feeling guilty about using Instagram? What are some ways to make them feel less guilty? How can we monetize this? Clarification How do we define guilt? Is there a relevant subsector of"See full answer

Pratik M. - "Few clarifying questions here Is the competitor a service and does it have other offerings as well? Is it charging $5 for a service or only email? Is it for a specific platform here? Or does it include all platforms? Does the competitor have a huge market share/or is it a small company? Let's assume it's only for email's The structure I would want to layout for knowing what to do next for Gmail would be the following - Mission, Goals, Google's revenue model, Customer Profiles using Gm"See full answer