I applied online. I interviewed at Zillow (Seattle, WA) in Jul 2022
Interview
I had a phone screening followed by a coding exercise on HackerRank.
This was for a senior position so phone screening was about my experience, my role and some challenges I faced in my past roles and how i managed.
The hacker rank problem was pasted by interviewer. It was a very confusing problem just to understand it right. I kept on asking questions to make sure i understand the problem, because the solution changed slighly based on different set of inputs.
Once i understood the problem, i started coding and also discussing what i was planning to do. I used core java and coded using a refactoring approach. I would code for happy cases and then refactor to accommodate other conditions.
I thought my coding exercise went pretty well because when I ran the program with first set of inputs, i got the correct answer and the interviewer said it is correct. The 2nd set of inputs gave a different answer because I had to refactor further but we stopped at there.
I thought it went quite well considering the complex problem and the time i took to solve it. A few days later i was told by the recruiter that they will not be moving forward with the process and they further said "the team felt that other candidates would be better suited for the role at this time". I have 20yrs of experience and i am still very hands-on in a number of tech stack. I have cleared many hacker rank coding interviews in the past. I was surprised with the response from the recruiter. I read similar feedback on other interviews. I will never waste my time applying for Zillow group again.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Last man standing problem
Two inputs
1. Stream of numbers - 1,3,5,8,9,12,40 etc
2. Step number eg: 1
I have write a program that starts with first number and then steps on the 2nd and then returns 5 and steps on 8 and return 8 - program has to keep on working until only one number from the stream remains.
When the step counter crosses the total numbers, it overflows to the beginning