I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at TikTok (San Jose, CA) in Mar 2023
Interview
I recently had an interview at Tiktok, and I have to say it was one of the worst interview experiences I've ever had. The interviewer was extremely rude and seemed disinterested in the interview process. It was clear that he wasn't focused on the interview, as he was doing something else at the same time. The interviewer also informed me that everyone at Tiktok is expected to work 996, which is a grueling work schedule. This is not the kind of company culture that I'm interested in, and it was disappointing to hear that this is the norm at Tiktok. Overall, I found the experience to be really awful. The interviewer didn't seem to want to talk much, and I felt like I was wasting my time. I would not recommend interviewing with Tiktok based on my experience.
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.
Interview questions [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.
