An Interview Question That Truly Tests Your Experience as a Software Engineer

Do you know how to avoid cache stampedes?

Photo by Nicolas Thomas on Unsplash

Leetcode has always been the holy grail to cracking the coding interview. Many engineers have said that the technical interview pipeline is broken. Three years ago, a technology company would not have told you to solve two Leetcode hard questions in a single setting. A lot of the technology companies right now, such as Facebook, expect you to finish two medium-hard questions — or else you may not go to the next round of the interview.

This interviewing style becomes the race of who can recognize the most Leetcode-style questions in one sitting, and it doesn’t test on one’s ability and experience to problem solve.

Many companies also realized that having a regular algorithm from Leetcode is not an effective way to examine candidates’ success ability in the workplace. Therefore, some other kinds of interview questions have been created to test a candidate’s problem-solving ability and gauge the experience of candidates.

The Question

Imagine you have a service that needs to do some work and call a third-party API — let’s name it API A. API A takes a long time to compute. Hence, your service should only call API A once.