Cracking the Coding Interview, 4 Edition - 150 Programming Interview Questions and Solutions

At the Interview | Frequently Asked Questions
Absolutely not. Responses can be held up for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do
with a good or bad performance. For example, an interviewer could have gone on vacation
right after your interview. A company will always tell you if you’re rejected (or at least I’ve
never heard of a company which didn’t).
Can I re-apply to a company after getting rejected?
Almost always, but you typically have to wait a bit (6 months – 1 year). Your first bad interview
usually won’t affect you too much when you re-interview. Lots of people got rejected
from Google or Microsoft and later got an offer.
How are interview questions selected?
This depends on the company, but any number of ways:
1. Pre-Assigned List of Questions: This is unusual at bigger companies.
2. Assigned Topics: Each interviewer is assigned a specific area to probe, but decides on
his/her own questions.
3. Interviewer’s Choice: Each interviewer asks whatever he / she wants. Usually, under
this system, the interviewers have a way of tracking which questions were asked to a
candidate to ensure a good diversity of questions.
Approach #3 is the most common. This system usually means that interviewers will each
have a “stock” set of five or so questions that they ask candidates.
What about experienced candidates?
This depends a lot on the company. On average though, experienced candidates will slightly
get more questions about their background, and they might face higher standards when discussing
system architecture (if this is relevant to their experience). For the most part though,
experienced candidates face much the same process.
Yes, for better or worse, experienced candidate should expect to go through the same coding
and algorithm questions. With respect to their performance, they could face either higher
standards (because they have more experience) or lower standards (because it’s likely been
many years since they worked with certain data structures).
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