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eBay coding interview / online assessment, format and difficulty

quietquit_quincy · 5 replies

Did the eBay online assessment a few weeks back and the onsite coding rounds recently. Documenting both because the format catches people off guard.

Online Assessment (OA) Codaility platform. 2 coding problems, 90 minutes. The problems I got were: A sliding window problem (medium difficulty, findable on LeetCode). Count subarrays where max minus min is within a threshold. A graph problem, BFS on a grid. Not hard, but the constraints were tight and a naive DFS would TLE.

Straightforward if you've been practicing. The 90 minutes was enough. No behavioral component in the OA, just code.

Onsite Coding Rounds Two separate 45-minute coding interviews. Format: they share a Google Doc or CoderPad, you write actual runnable code. They do run it.

Round 1: String manipulation problem, medium. I had a clean solution in about 20 minutes, which gave time to discuss edge cases and optimizations. They asked me to optimize from O(n^2) to O(n).

Round 2: Dynamic programming problem. Not the hardest DP, but they added a twist mid-problem. This is the one that got me. The initial ask was easy but they changed a constraint halfway through to see if I could adapt without starting over.

Difficulty overall: LeetCode medium, occasionally medium-hard. I didn't see anything that I'd call hard. But the mid-problem constraint change was the real test.

Language: I used Python. They're fine with whatever. One interviewer specifically said they care about clean, readable code over terse tricks.

For prep: practice on a Google Doc with no autocomplete for a few sessions. Sounds dumb but it matters.

5 replies

frontend_fran

The 'change a constraint mid-problem' thing is so stressful. Did they give any warning or just drop it on you?

quietquit_quincy

Zero warning. You solve part 1, they say 'great, now what if the array can have duplicates' or whatever. It's deliberate. They want to see you reason about the impact, not panic.

newgrad_neil

Is the OA sent right after the recruiter screen or do they schedule it separately? Trying to figure out timeline.

quietquit_quincy

Mine was sent 2 days after the recruiter call with a 7-day window to complete it. Got my onsite invite about 10 days after submitting.

mobile_mara

Practiced on Google Docs for Amazon prep too. Felt silly but 100% relevant. You type weirdly slow when there's no autocomplete.