Rust Interview with a Google engineer

Interview Summary

Problem type

K nearest restaurants

Interview question

Given a list of 100 million restaurants, write a function that takes a user's location and returns the 10 nearest

Interview Feedback

Feedback about Professor Squirrel (the interviewee)

• Advance this person to the next round?
  Yes
• How were their technical skills? 4/4
• How was their problem solving ability? 4/4
• What about their communication ability? 4/4

This is our second session, the candidate blazed through their interview the last time round so we worked on a slightly harder problem this time.
The problem we worked on today was the 100 million restaurant problem. The candidate was able to come up with expected brute force solution right away - iterating through all 100 million, but using a max heap to keep track of the 10 nearest. They were able to figure out the need to segment the search space with a little hint and they managed to arrive at the intended solution without little guidance.
Overall, the candidate was fantastic, their performance is easily one of the best I have encountered for the approximately 400 interviews I have conducted.

Feedback about Immutable Automaton (the interviewer)

• Would you want to work with this person?
  Yes
• How excited would you be to work with them? 4/4
• How good were the questions? 4/4
• How helpful was your interviewer in guiding you to the solution(s)? 4/4

Thanks for the interview -- really cool questions!

Interview Transcript

Immutable Automaton: Hello!
Professor Squirrel: Hi how's it going?
Immutable Automaton: Hi, good. All right. So uh, we did two questions last time, right.
Professor Squirrel: Sounds about right.
Immutable Automaton: All right. So today, I have a question for you. Would you like to do something? Do you have a specific type that you want to try?

[The conversation continues with details of the interview, discussing problem-solving and coding strategies related to finding the 10 nearest restaurants to a user's location. The discussion also involves performance considerations and data structures, particularly focusing on using a max heap and other structures to optimize the solution. The interviewer and interviewee elaborate on methodologies and reflect on their strategies throughout the process, leading to the conclusion of their interaction.]

Conclusion

• The session provided rich feedback on both coding performance and problem-solving abilities. The candidate displayed a strong command of Rust and demonstrated critical analytical thinking throughout the interview.
• The interviewer expressed confidence in the candidate’s capacity to excel in further technical interviews.