Snap · Primly Community

Snap coding interview / online assessment, format and difficulty

hardware_hugo · 5 replies

Did the Snap OA and two coding rounds this cycle. Here's the breakdown since I couldn't find much recent info when I was prepping.

Online assessment: Two problems, 90 minutes. Hosted on HackerRank. Problems I got were a medium array manipulation and what felt like a modified graph BFS problem. Not super hard, but the second one had an edge case that tripped me up initially. I'd say LC medium difficulty overall, with the harder one pushing toward medium-hard.

Time pressure is real. 90 min for two problems sounds fine until the second one requires thinking through a non-obvious traversal.

Phone screen coding: 45 minutes with an engineer, collaborative editor (CoderPad). One problem, and they asked me to walk through my approach before writing code. The problem was a string manipulation thing, nothing exotic. But they DID ask about time and space complexity mid-solution, not at the end. Be ready for that.

Onsite coding rounds (virtual): Two 45-minute rounds. I got a dynamic programming problem in round 1 and a two-pointer/sliding window in round 2. Both were LC medium. One interviewer mentioned after the fact that they're not supposed to ask hard, so if you're getting smoked, something is off with your prep or the interviewer misread the rubric.

Overall I'd rate it: solidly medium difficulty, not the grind-LC-hards-for-weeks gauntlet some companies require. Python and JavaScript are fine. I used Python and they seemed completely unbothered.

I did not get any Snap-specific questions (like, nothing about how Snap's architecture works or anything product-specific). Purely algorithmic.

I am now in debrief wait hell so cannot report on outcome yet.

5 replies

sdr_sky

this is super helpful. did the OA questions feel like straight leetcode or more like they were adapted versions? asking because i want to know if grinding blind 75 covers it

market_realist

blind 75 + neetcode 150 covers it pretty well i think. the problems felt like they were from a bank, not custom. but don't skip graphs and dp, those showed up for me.

marketer_mei

"not supposed to ask hard" is actually a stated policy at a few companies now. fb/meta moved away from hards too after a round of feedback. doesn't mean easy though, just calibrated.

jp_newgrad

how long between OA and the phone screen? i submitted mine 10 days ago and haven't heard anything

market_realist

mine was 8 days. snap recruiting can be slow to respond. i'd follow up with the recruiter after 2 weeks.