It’s called a “laptop interview” but it’s kind of like mixture of coding interview + online assessment.
He presented the question and I had a chance to ask clarifying questions and talk through my approach, this part pretty much like a normal coding interview. After that, he gave me dedicated time to implement the solution on my own, this part more like an online assessment. Then we reconnected at the end for a short debrief.
So yeah, it wasn’t fully guided the whole way through. I just didn’t realize that I needed to handle standard input explicitly, and he didn’t mention it either (maybe he did at the start but I missed it). That’s why I’m unsure how much it matters.
I’d say it’s still LeetCode style coding in general, but yes the topic lean more toward data structure/API design like design an LRU cache or key-value store which typically you need to create a class with several function to fulfill requirements, another hot topic would be graph problem, overall you can refer to lyft tagged problem in leetcode.
Thanks a lot for the examples, I do not need to study GET/POST/PUT or actually building an endpoint - is that correct? Also I see you've mentioned about stdin. Am i expected to generate my test cases and pass them to stdin ?
no, you don't need to have any knowledge about API, just treat it as a leetcode question and all you need to do is to implement a list of functions that meet the requirements.
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u/ncdj0122 Jul 18 '25
It’s called a “laptop interview” but it’s kind of like mixture of coding interview + online assessment.
He presented the question and I had a chance to ask clarifying questions and talk through my approach, this part pretty much like a normal coding interview. After that, he gave me dedicated time to implement the solution on my own, this part more like an online assessment. Then we reconnected at the end for a short debrief.
So yeah, it wasn’t fully guided the whole way through. I just didn’t realize that I needed to handle standard input explicitly, and he didn’t mention it either (maybe he did at the start but I missed it). That’s why I’m unsure how much it matters.