Hey [redacted],

Unfortunately, we're not going to move forward with your application right now. Interviewing is a messy process, and we know that we'll inevitably make mistakes as we iron out our process. We also believe in giving the people we interview honest feedback.

We're really glad we had the chance to talk with you, and we hope that the interview was a good experience for you. We learn a lot from every candidate we talk with. We saw some real strength on the tic tac toe section. You seem very comfortable in your editor. We were impressed by your knowledge of specifics of web systems. You talked really well about designing basic web systems on the used car API design problem. You talked well about programming. And you were friendly and we enjoyed talking to you.

Here are the areas we think you could improve. You didn't seem very comfortable in Python. You didn't do that well when we talked about relational databases, low level systems, and data structures. On the used car API design problem, though you had a great approach to the basic design of the system, you didn't have as much familiarity with how to scale it up.

Here's our advice. We're erring on the side of volume rather than specificity here. All the things we recommend would be valuable for you to do. However, if there seems to be too much here to hope to do, don't despair--we aren't saying that you'd need to learn all this to get through our process, and we certainly aren't saying that you'd need all this to get a job.

If you want to practice interview-style problems under pressure, you might want to try out doing problems from Leetcode or HackerRank. Coding small scale programming logic quickly is a useful and distinct skill, and it's somewhat valuable to practice it directly.

You should learn more about web technologies. You should learn how HTTP works at a deep enough level that you know things like how cookies are implemented. You should know about database indexes, database normalization, and things like that. This course is good (but it's also much more than you need to know).

We recommend you study algorithms more deeply. If you want to study algorithms some more, The Algorithm Design Manual is a particularly good and practically-oriented algorithms textbook, and it's freely available on the internet. Reading the third chapter, which is about how to think about data structures, would be really helpful. There are also many algorithms MOOCs: doing one of these would be good practice. You also might enjoy the advice about studying algorithms on this page. In particular, you should know the runtimes for all the methods on the collections classes available in your language. A great resource is Interview Cake, a unique course that focuses specifically on learning the right ways to think about the kinds of algorithms and data structures problems that come up in technical interviews. Their Data Structures and Algorithms Guide is a down-to-earth overview of the most essential concepts.

We think you're really high potential, and we'd love to talk to you if you're still job searching in four months (we of course hope for your sake that you're happily employed by then), or next time you want a job.

And again, we know this isn't a perfect process and we'd love to hear your honest feedback on how we might have improved it. We're also happy to hear any other questions you have.

Best,

Triplebyte Team