Dropbox | Phone Screen | Game of Life
Interview Experience
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], ...
Full Details
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],
[1,1,1],
[0,0,0]
]
Output:
[
[0,0,0],
[1,0,1],
[0,1,1],
[0,1,0]
]
After solving the question in about 20 minutes, he then asked to write a few test cases, which I did.
Follow-up question:
What if the board is a million by a million?
He clearly expected some calculation here trying to figure out total size if the board was to be loaded in memory. I told him it was too big to fit into memory. Instead we can load each cell and its surrounding 8 cells at a time. He wasn\'t satisfied with my answer.
A week later I was
rejected. Overall the interviewer was kind and I expected rejection because I know I didnt answer his followup question well.
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a dropbox interview for a swe role (senior level) during the phone screen round reported in 2019.
It covers the following topics: General Experience .
Topics
More Dropbox Interview Questions
About Dropbox Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Dropbox. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Dropbox are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Dropbox interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Dropbox reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Dropbox Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Dropbox reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.