BlackRock Data Engineer Interview Experience — A HackerRank Screen With No SQL at All

After I got unlucky and was laid off from my previous company, I wiped my tears and quickly opened up LinkedIn. Turns out I should have done LeetCode before opening LinkedIn. 🐶

This company was really strange. At first a recruiter reached out to me about an interview, but when I applied on the company website I got instantly rejected. The next day the recruiter called me and said it was just a location issue, told me not to take it to heart, and set me up for a HackerRank interview.

The interviewer for the tech round was a guy, and he was extremely, extremely nice — he kept giving me hints the whole time. But I just hadn't practiced enough problems, and my approach was wrong from the very start; I over-complicated the issue and ran out of time.

The first question was LeetCode 56. I didn't need to get it running; I just had to roughly write out my approach. Honestly, I was already wrong at this step, but neither of us noticed the issue at the time.

The second question was LeetCode 57, and it had to pass the test cases. I overthought it — I created a set to track which numbers I'd already seen, which was completely, completely unnecessary. I could just modify the array in place and append. I got stuck on the append condition for a really long time, and that's what ate up all my time.

It's honestly hard to believe — this was supposed to be a Data Engineer interview, and there wasn't a single SQL question. Not sure if that's because I ran out of time before we could get to it, or because they just don't ask SQL at all.

Sending out a wish for good luck here — I really need to land something.