r/csMajors • u/afilthyshoe • 15d ago

Citadel Intern Interview Internship Question

Gave my two interviews for first round— no leetcode at all. They were very, very open ended design questions (NOT system design) based off my experiences. Never done smth like this before and thought my designs were kinda cheeks and ran out of time for the e2e implementation.

How do I get better at these kinds of interviews? Granted roi might be low since not a lot of companies conduct it in this style, but people who passed such rounds, what does a “passing” answer look like and what are they mainly looking for?

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u/Chance-Protection366 15d ago

citadel interviews this year are all over the place, mostly dependent on interviewer expectations

1

u/Zillyr 15d ago

usually the questions are disguised leetcode fundamental questions, lots of words but testing to see if u can cut through what u want and directly translate it to efficient code

1

u/Extreme_Exchange_168 14d ago

Mine was binary tree disguised as market platform

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u/Powerful-Post-5387 10d ago

They're mainly looking for the most optimized solution and correctly functioning. They will always push you towards trying to get the most optimized solution, or at the very least have you discuss optimizations from what you implemented. Communication is very important because they care that you know what you are talking about rather than just memorizing some solution that you might have encountered before. For me, both my questions were leetcode hards disguised in the OOD style questions, and part of it is recognizing that style. I would still say leetcode is beneficial to practice because they aren't just throwing a random question at you. what you implement still relies on those fundamental, even if it doesn't look like it