ByteDance TikTok Ph.D. Technical Phone Screen Interview Experience

This post was last edited by only_temp_use on 2025-10-7 12:20. I applied to many companies without any referrals. No online assessment (OA), HR contacted me directly. My research direction wasn't rele

This post was last edited by only_temp_use on 2025-10-7 12:20. I applied to many companies without any referrals. No online assessment (OA), HR contacted me directly. My research direction wasn't relevant. All interviews were conducted on Lark. I wrote the code and performed the tests myself. The first round was a virtual interview (VO). It included a sliding window problem (Medium), a binary tree with a camera (tree dynamic programming, hard), and a follow-up problem involving another binary tree (hard follow-up). I didn't need to write code for this follow-up, just explain how I solved it, and I had to explain the time and space complexity for each problem. I solved all of them and advanced to the second round. The second round was a VO. They immediately asked me to explain how my research direction was relevant to their work and what applications it could have (I suspect I failed because of this). Since it wasn't relevant, I didn't really understand it, so I just gave a vague answer. Then they asked me to implement an LFU algorithm in C++. I struggled for a long time to write it, and I also wrote my own test cases, which

passed the tests. Then, three days later, I was notified that I failed.