Suning R&D Center 2nd Round Video Interview 11.7

2nd round interview with Suning R&D Center which is focusing on search engine. However I'm more interested in cloud computing and distributed system such infrastructure stuffs.

There are 2 back-2-back interviews each about 50 minutes. Both interviewers are really biubility persons.

The first interview with Director of Search was talking about how to deal with parsing the user input queries. The first step is to add white space if user forgets to do that. Thus it was a coding problem given a input string and a dictionary containing all the words. It was easily done by a dfs. The second step is how to you deal with the phrase consisted by several words. For example if the input string is androidphone and there are three words "an, android, phone" in the dictionary. How to you delimit it as "android phone" rather then "an doird phone". And the only project experience talking about is search engine.

The second interview with an Senior PM was talking about how to optimize the search engine. What we focused on is how to scale up. After that given a situation that how to you count how many facebook user read a post if some of them shared that post.

I should be more prepared for this interview because I have already found that the interviewers are mostly focus on the information retrieval technology from LinkedIn.

Learned

• 肯定会被问到的就是你想做什么方向。
• 为什么你想做这个方向
• （应该提前想好这两个问题用英语怎么说，要不然突然发现想表达的观点里有些词不知道怎么讲真是好尴尬）
• 既然已经提前发现他们都是做搜索的，就应该多多准备这个方向的内容，虽然我对这个不是特别感兴趣。最后证明他们确实在问搜索方面的问题，而且只问了这个的问题）
• 当问设计题、思考题（coding之外的题目时），不要光说答案啊，要把整个思考的过程说出来，应该主要是表达出自己的思维和逻辑能力

总体来说，做的方向和问题的方向不是很match。另一方面头一次被问这种设计题和思考题，不太会答题的策略。所以除了上来的第一道算法题飞快就写出来了以外，别的答得都不咋地。估计是跪了。

最后hr打来电话问我啥时候能开始工作，我说二月份。然后hr就表示那估计悬了，他们想要立马就能工作的。。。当时还是挺无语的，毕竟你们在招new grad，我十二月底才能毕业，哪儿有new grad能面试完就立马入职啊，难道要人毕业之后才开始找工作么。而且不能一开始先问清楚我啥时候能入职么，都面到这会儿了才说。。

Medium interview experience.