Software Engineering Job Interview – Full Mock Interview

Keith Galley conducts a full-length mock technical interview with Kylie Ying for a software engineering position. They discuss the importance of object-oriented programming and dynamic programming in solving interview questions. The interview format is designed to mimic a real software engineering interview, covering problem understanding, questioning, and optimization. The session begins with a brief introduction and a setup using CoderPad, an online code sharing tool.

The interview dives into an object-oriented design problem where Kylie is tasked with designing a system for an online cloud reading application, similar to Amazon Kindle but focused on short stories. The discussion covers user requirements, such as a library of books, active book tracking, and remembering the last page read. The problem-solving approach emphasizes structuring the code and core components, including considering data structures for books and libraries.

Kylie outlines a class structure for the book system, considering attributes like book titles, content, and last viewed page. The discussion moves on to implementing classes for books and libraries, where books are represented as objects with titles and content, and libraries as collections of these book objects. The conversation also touches on the use of lists and tuples for representing book content.

The interview continues with the implementation details of incrementing the last viewed page and managing the active book within the library. It's decided to use a unique ID for each book to avoid duplication and to manage the active book state. The conversation also briefly explores the possibility of using a tuple or list for book representation, settling on a list for its ordered collection benefits.

Kylie begins writing Python pseudocode to define the classes for the book system. The focus is on initializing book objects with titles and content, setting up the last page viewed, and considering the use of a counter for unique book IDs. The discussion also includes the idea of a display page function and incrementing page views to simulate turning pages in the application.

The interview shifts to an algorithm problem focused on detecting plagiarism in a library of books. The goal is to find the two books with the longest shared common section of text. The discussion explores different approaches, including a naive solution and the idea of using dynamic programming to efficiently find the longest common substring between two books.

Kylie and Keith discuss the complexity of substring matching and the need for an optimized solution. They talk about the limitations of a naive approach and the potential use of memoization to store intermediate results and improve efficiency. The conversation also touches on the challenges of iterating over the same indices and the importance of avoiding unnecessary重复计算.

The interview concludes with a discussion on handling unique book IDs and user-specific customizations in a multi-user system. The idea of using a global ID system and leveraging a database to store book information is explored. The conversation also briefly touches on the possibility of subclassing to handle user-specific data while maintaining shared book information.

Kylie reflects on the interview experience, noting the difficulty of the dynamic programming problem but also expressing satisfaction with the collaborative and casual nature of the discussion. The conversation highlights the importance of not getting flustered when faced with challenging problems and the value of being able to rebound and work towards a solution.

The interview ends with a discussion on the potential benefits of following up after an interview with solutions to problems that were not solved during the interview. Kylie shares general interview tips, such as asking questions to turn the interview into a conversation, repeating questions for clarification, starting with a naive solution, and optimizing from there. The importance of testing solutions and considering edge cases is also emphasized.