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Dropbox Software Engineer Phone Screen Questions

20+ questions from real Dropbox Software Engineer Phone Screen rounds, reported by candidates who interviewed there.

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What does the Dropbox Phone Screen round test?

The Dropbox phone screen typically lasts 45-60 minutes and evaluates core Software Engineer fundamentals. Candidates should expect 1-2 algorithmic problems, basic system design discussion at senior levels, and questions about relevant experience. The goal is to confirm technical competence before bringing candidates onsite.

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Dropbox Software Engineer Phone Screen Questions

File access System I was asked the following question. If given the folder access tree and given query folder name, return TRUE|FALSE is user have access to it. for eg. below -...

YOE : 6+ Location : Bay area Telephonic: 1.) https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/417262/dropbox-phone-screen-permissions-in-a-file-system They just expect you to save the data as dictionary with parent child relationship and just traverse it to find if the...

I had my onsite in January 2021. Phone: Game of Life (look it up) Onsite: 1. Reader-Writer Lock 2. All-Around Interview with a Hiring Manager 3. Id Allocator 4. Design a Logging Service The question packet and...

This was for sw2. I was supposed to search a dir to find files that have have the same content. Ex. hello.txt = "hello" and fjalfja.txt = "hello" and main.cpp,...

I got the file permission question similar to https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/417262/dropbox-phone-screen-permissions-in-a-file-system and the follow-up was to modify implementation so that only the parent has access, for example: A -> B \t ----> C if we have...

Status: 6 Years of Experience Position: Senior SWE - Full Stack Location: HQ Phone Interview (1 hour): https://leetcode.com/problems/game-of-life/ Follow up: what if the board was very large, how would you deal with that? Interviewer said i...

Problem : A non-empty zero-indexed array A consisting of N integers is given. Array A represents a linked list. A list is constructed from this array as follows: \u2022 the first node (the...

Problem Statement: Given a file directory, return lists of files that are same in content. Example Input: /foo - /foo - /images - /foo.png <------. - /temp | same file contents -...

Location: San Francisco Position: Senior SDE First round phone interview. https://leetcode.com/problems/game-of-life The interviewer made the question easier by returning the next state of board as opposed to modifying the original input. Input: [[0,1,0], [0,0,1], ...

Phone : https://leetcode.com/problems/find-duplicate-file-in-system/ Code was not supposed to run/compile but it was expected to write whole code and making sure that it would run. I had to ask...

Hi, I got this question in dropbox in tech screening. And I am also posting my solution which I gave but I am very disappinted as I got reject. Please give...

Position: Front end Engineer Phone interview. 1. Implement getByClassName() javascript // element.children => HTMLCollection // element.className => string /** * @function getByClassName * @param {Element} root \u2013 The root of the DOM tree * @param {string} className * @return...

Round 1: DS/PS Gas Station Singleton class and implementation. final, static, transient, synchronized and volatile keywords and their usage. Immutable class in Java and implementation. Round 2: System Design Design a...

A # | B # | | C <-- access # | | D # | E <-- access # |___ F ---- G # folders = [(\'A\', None), (\'B\', \'A\'), (\'C\', \'B\'), (\'D\',...

Had a phone screen with an arrogant L3 engineer and was rejected after coming up with working BFS solution. # # A # |___ B # | |___ C <-- access # | |___...

Dropbox | phone screen

System Design 2020

I was asked the below question, during my phone screen today. Can anyone help me on this. Write a method for ColumnLayoutManager that takes input arguments: list of views with width and...

I have my phone screen round at Dropbox in 1 week. Any idea what type of questions will be asked for interns?? Will there be system design questions?

Status: M.Tech new grad ( Computer Science and Engineering) Position: Software Engineer Location: Bangalore, India Date: 1 December 2019 There were four rounds, and it was an on-campus recruitment drive. Round 1: Online Assesment on...

## Problem Crawl a file system directory tree, collecting and processing files using BFS or DFS traversal. ## Likely LeetCode equivalent None identified with high confidence. ## Tags coding, graph, bfs, file_system, phone

## Problem You have a collection of letter tiles (possibly with duplicates) and a dictionary of valid words. Find all unique valid words that can be formed using any subset of the tiles (each tile used at most once). ```python def find_valid_words(tiles: list[str], dictionary: set[str]) -> list[str]: # tiles: list of single uppercase letters, e.g. ["A","A","B","T"] # Returns sorted list of unique valid words pass ``` **Example:** ``` tiles = ["A", "A", "B", "T"] dictionary = {"BAT", "TAB", "AAB", "AT", "BAA", "AABB"} -> ["AT", "BAT", "TAB"] # "AAB" not valid (only 1 B available but 2 A's -- wait: 2 A's ARE available, # so "AAB" is valid if in dictionary) ``` ## Round 1 - Coding Implement the search using backtracking with a frequency map of available tiles. ## Follow-ups 1. How do you use a trie (prefix tree) to prune the search space early when no word in the dictionary starts with the current prefix? 2. What is the worst-case time complexity with and without trie pruning? 3. How would you handle blank tiles (wildcards) that can represent any letter? 4. If the dictionary contains 500,000 words, what is a practical strategy to avoid memory issues with the trie?

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