Very bad communications.
After I passed the initial round, I was moved onto another round of interview. When I passed the second round of interview to move to "final round of interview", they did not respond for a month. When I sent couple emails to check on status as I had other interviews that I needed to finish and schedule along, I received no response. After about a month, they just informed me that I passed the last round but was put on hold due to their hiring and acquisition-related issues. After about another month after, I did 3rd round of interview with a hiring manager, I believe. The manager specifically told me to just stop explaining my thought process and algorithm and just write your code. I did well for the coding part but could not answer some of the questions he asked well. I got a feedback that they would like to interview one more time. I couldn't solve the problem given. I think it was one of the toughest problems. After such a long interview process, I just received an email telling me that I got rejected without any additional feedback.
Afterwards, I received couple other recruiter emails from Tiktok and, then, was informed that they saw my previous history of interview and would not move forward when I scheduled the calls.
In general, I could see that the culture is probably really bad at the company.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
I cannot remember the exact questions but similar to leetcode questions and some distributed systems questions.
J'ai passé un entretien chez TikTok (San Francisco, CA)
Entretien
OA - 1 arrays Medium, 1 Trie Hard. I had 45 minutes to complete that. I was able to do the medium in about 15-20 minutes but I am not that great with trie ds so I was not able to finish.
Four Round Process
Phone Interview with Human Resources
Coding Round; 1 DSA Leetcode Medium Q
Coding Round: 2 DSA Leetcode Medium Q
Manager Round: System Design Q and behavioural Q
It took about four weeks from application to offer, longer than I initially expected. The initial phone screen was straightforward, covering my resume and some basic algorithms. Then came the technical rounds, which were challenging. One question on minimum window substrings had me diving into a sliding-window approach using pointers and hashmaps. Funny enough, I recognized it mid-round as something I’d practiced on PracHub just days before. After a final system design discussion, I received the offer and happily accepted.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
Given two strings s and t, return the minimum window substring of s that contains every character of t including duplicates, or an empty string if no such window exists. Walk through the sliding-window approach using two pointers and a character-frequency hashmap, analyze the O(|s| + |t|) time complexity, and discuss how to adapt it when t contains characters not present in s or when s arrives as a stream that cannot be fully buffered.