Java Interview with a Spotify engineer

Watch someone solve the even palindrome generator problem in an interview with a Spotify engineer and see the feedback their interviewer left them. Explore this problem and others in our library of interview replays.

Interview Summary

Problem type
Even palindrome generator
Interview question

1. Generate all even number palindromes with 8 digits.
2. Generate the word index that goes in the end of a textbook.
   Read more about the questions

• Palindrome Generator

Interview Feedback

Feedback about Spasmodic Donut (the interviewee)
Advance this person to the next round?

No

How were their technical skills?
3/4

How was their problem solving ability?
3/4

What about their communication ability?
2/4

Behavioral Question

• The question “Tell me about a project you worked on, a technical challenge you faced, and how you solved” should be answered succinctly. Have two or three specific projects that you know inside and out, that you can dive deeply into if prompted. You were somewhat loose with the “technical” aspect. Even when I prompted you further, to discuss tradeoffs more precisely, you didn't follow that advice.

Question 1 (Palindrome Generator)

• Catches edge case of leading zeros? Yes. You brought up a good example of eight 0’s being the smallest case, which I then corrected you on.
• You brought up a brute force approach to start, which is good, but you didn't necessarily bring up that there is likely something better.
• It’s important to communicate your thoughts and clarify when necessary.

Question 2 (Book Index Generator):

• The open-ended question about how you want the "book" given to you as input is an important one. Your intuition to use a list of list of strings was good.
• You didn't bring up the issue of overly common words until prompted.
• Using a hashset for the unimportant words vs a list was a very good insight!

General Notes:

• Be a lot more communicative! Your previous interviewer's feedback about it was spot on.
• Overall, your problem-solving was good, but the lack of communication was what pushed me from "soft pass" territory to "reject" territory.

Feedback about The Benevolent Enigma (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

Interview Transcript

• The Benevolent Enigma: How's it going?
• Spasmodic Donut: Hi. Can you hear me?
• The Benevolent Enigma: Yep, I can hear you. Okay, how about can you hear me?
• Spasmodic Donut: Yeah, yeah, I can hear you.

... [continuation of the dialogue, summarizing key interactions and feedback] ...

Conclusion

• Overall, this interview demonstrated the importance of communication in technical interviews.
• Future improvement areas include being more specific and articulate during technical discussions.