Deloitte · Primly Community

Deloitte coding interview and online assessment: format, difficulty, what actually showed up

market_realist · 4 replies

So I just finished the Deloitte online assessment and technical coding round. Going to write this while it's fresh because the info I found prepping was either really old or for a different practice.

This was for a software engineering consultant role, mid-level, tech consulting practice.

Online Assessment (HackerRank platform) 90 minutes. 2 coding problems.

Problem 1 was a string manipulation thing. Not hard. Clean solution in Python, probably 20 minutes.

Problem 2 was more of a graph/BFS problem. Medium on LeetCode scale. I got it working but my first solution timed out on a large test case. Refactored to BFS and it passed. Total time: about 75 minutes, which is fine.

There was also a short section of multiple choice: some basic CS concepts (complexity, data structures), one or two SQL questions. Not deep. If you know what a hash map is and can write a SELECT with a JOIN, you're good.

Live coding round (60 min, Zoom + shared IDE) One problem. They gave me 5 minutes to read it. It was a modified two-pointer / sliding window variant. The interviewer was pretty chill, asked clarifying questions before I started coding, seemed genuinely interested in watching me think through it.

I made a mistake early (off-by-one on a boundary case) and caught it while walking through examples out loud. The interviewer noted it positively afterward on the call, which I didn't expect.

Takeaways This is not a FAANG-caliber LeetCode gauntlet. You don't need to grind 200 problems. You need to be solid on: arrays/strings, hashmaps, BFS/DFS, basic SQL, and O(n) reasoning. Practice talking through your approach before you code. That communication piece matters a lot here.

One more thing: the OA comes before the live screen, so there's a bit of self-paced breathing room. Use it.

4 replies

newgrad_neil

Did you get the multiple choice questions on any specific CS topics or more general interview stuff? I'm cramming for an OA next week and not sure how deep to go on algorithms vs general software concepts.

market_realist

Pretty general. Big-O notation, which data structure for which use case, one question about REST API concepts. Nothing on graph theory or dynamic programming at the conceptual level. Focus your energy on the actual coding sections, that's where it counts.

backend_bekah

The "caught your own mistake" thing is real. They're not looking for perfection, they're looking for someone who debugs calmly and thinks out loud. I've seen interviewers give higher marks to someone who found and fixed a bug than someone who got it right the first time in silence.

bootcamp_bri

This is actually really encouraging. I was worried Deloitte tech would be more intense than my skill level. Sounds like if you can do solid medium problems and communicate well, you have a shot.