I applied online. I interviewed at ByteDance (Singapur) in Sep 2022
Interview
Interviewed for Backend Intern role in ByteDance(Singapore) from September to October 2022. The whole process took around 1 month plus.
First of all, I would like to commend the HR department for being helpful, responsive and fast in their process of moving me throughout the interview stages. They took no longer than 3 days on average after each interview to give me a response.
The interview process for Backend engineer intern are as follows:
1. OA (online assessment)
- Held on HackerRank with a 2-hour time limit
- 2 multiple choice questions and 3 DSA style questions.
- The MCQs are to test your fundamentals in programming methodology and language knowledge (Java in my case) and are relatively straight forward.
- The DSA questions' difficulty range from easier medium to harder medium (in terms of LeetCode difficulty).
2. Technical interview with Senior SWE.
- Delved deep into my resume and asked questions for almost every portion of my resume to test if I really understood what I wrote. I think it's done so that they can sieve out people who fake their resumes or aren't as credible as what they say they are.
- medium (on the harder side) DSA coding question, I figured out the optimal solution within 5 minutes but had some hiccups during the implementation. Luckily my interviewer is forgiving and patient and gave hints to point out where I went wrong.
- I think I passed this interview despite the hiccup because I did decent for the resume technical questions and came up with the optimal solution relatively fast.
3. Interview with Hiring manager (technical lead).
- Introduced the team's responsibilities to me
- Asked me technical questions related to Linux and bash, computer networks, SpringBoot(because it's in my resume) and Java.
- one medium level DSA question. Came up with the optimal time complexity solution within 5 minutes. Implementation this time round had no hiccups, however the first version of my code could be further refactored and optimized code-wise and was hinted by the manager to do so.
4. Interview with HR
- Asked me general questions such as why do you want to work at ByteDance, introduce yourself etc.
- Asked me if I had any questions.
Advice (Bonus):
- Nail your CS fundamentals down (minimally all the core modules you have taken in year 1 and 2), if possible do not only memorize a set of possible questions as you could be asked anything. Make sure you understand the technologies you mention in your resume to a respectable degree (know why you are using this technology and how it kind of works under the hood etc.).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Already mentioned above in the interview process portion.
First interview was the with the HR and then after that round, the next one was an interview with the technical person, and This is followed by two other technical rounds.
There are a total of three rounds of interviews, all of which are technical interviews. The focus is mainly on asking about past project experiences. They will inquire about your thoughts and details. In the last part of the first two rounds, there will be handwritten coding tasks, which are all very simple questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement a function to sort tasks that are interdependent.
Multiple stage interview process of similar structure with different levels in the firm. First 2 stages were a 3 part process. First going through past projects and experiences. Second was open-ended technical questions relevant to your role. Third was a live coding exercise.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What are some of your past projects and what tools did you use? What were the considerations behind the use of these tools.
