RejectedOnsite

Aced the HM Round, Failed a Simple Tree DP Problem

ZipHQSoftware Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025

Overall the difficulty was pretty easy — too bad I failed this tech round. Tech round: a tree problem. Each node has a value. For each node, you can pick either the current node's value, or the values of its children. If you pick the current node, you can't also pick its children — return the maximum value sum. The core of it is really just getValue(root): return max(getValue(root), getVal(root.c…

Shared by a candidate · reported Aug 2025. Interview formats change; use it as a guide, not a script.