Snowflake phone screen felt fine, still got rejected after 3 rounds
Had my Snowflake process finish up last week. Rejected after 3 coding rounds total. Tbh I'm still a bit confused about how it all went.
Started with two separate phone screens. First one was a 2D grid problem, find the minimum distance from each person to the nearest cake. Classic BFS, I got through it fine, talked through edge cases. Second round was a tree problem with some nodes marked as deleted, find the max height skipping deleted nodes. Solved it but the interviewer was kind of rigid, kept pushing back on my approach even though it was correct. That was a bit frustrating ngl.
Then recruiter called a week later to say feedback was "mixed" and asked if I'd do a third coding round. I said yes. Third round went well from my side. Different BFS variant, got the optimal solution.
Got the rejection two days after. "Not strong enough" was the gist. Honestly I'm not sure what I did wrong. Anyone who's been through Snowflake know if this is just how it goes?
3 YOE, TC currently around 180k
Replies (5)
This is basically exactly what happened to me at Snowflake last year. Solved every problem, got the "mixed feedback" call, did the extra round, rejected. Never got any useful explanation.
The tree with deleted nodes problem is also a common one there. Sounds like you prepped the right stuff, just got unlucky with the feedback. back to grinding I guess.
Snowflake interviewers can be really hit or miss. The rigid ones who push back without giving a counterexample are so annoying. Sorry you ran into one on round 2.
"Not strong enough" after solving all three rounds feels awful. Did you ever get any specifics from the recruiter?
Nope. Recruiter just said the team was looking for a stronger signal. I asked for more detail and they pretty much ghosted after that.
The cake BFS problem is literally in every Snowflake loop lol. How did the third round differ from the first two?
Third one was more like a shortest path between nodes problem, given an API that returns linked pages. Felt cleaner than round 2 tbh. No weird pushback from the interviewer.