Two Sigma SWE loop, OA to VO breakdown

Two Sigma SWE loop, OA to VO breakdown

Just finished my Two Sigma SWE loop, figured I'd share since the interview post-mortems here have helped me a lot for other companies.

OA was the classic two question set, IPO share allocation and Split Drainage Tree, cut one edge in a tree to make the two resulting flow totals as close as possible. Did a DFS to get subtree sums first then scanned all possible cuts for the minimum difference. Looked both up afterward and turns out they show up in a bunch of OA writeups already.

Phone screen was OOD, in-memory mini DB, create table, insert, select with AND-only conditions. Bar felt pretty low here honestly, mostly about getting something that actually runs rather than clean code, so I focused on parsing the select clause correctly and left exception handling for last.

VO was two rounds, one algorithm round on a tree max independent set problem (had to write my own test cases too), one system design round for an internal dataset ingestion tool, pretty different from a typical consumer app SD question.

Still waiting to hear back. If anyone has the mini DB round coming up, don't over-invest in edge case handling early, just get it running first.