You are given a snippet and asked to predict behaviour, then defend it. The interviewer mutates the snippet to probe depth. Success is an exact prediction plus a clear rule-based explanation. A live-interview round is different: you are given a symptom, not a snippet, and the interviewer scores how you narrow it down.
Framework for any unseen puzzle: a five-step attack you can use on a snippet you have never seen.
Interview-day tips: thinking aloud, clarifying questions, handling an unknown.
Each scenario page has the setup, what the interviewer is measuring, the structure of a strong answer, a model conversation, the traps and the puzzles that rehearse the same skills.
Scenario | Skill it tests |
|---|---|
Whether you localise before you theorise: you ask what is stuck before you guess why. | |
Whether you treat constraints as one declarative system that must have a solution, not as lines executed in order. | |
Whether you know that a pass can be vacuous, and what evidence separates a real pass from an empty one. | |
Whether you separate three causes of a plateau: stimulus that never reaches the bin, a bin that cannot legally be reached, and a model that samples the wrong thing. | |
Scenario: Race That Only Shows on Silicon-Like Gate-Level Timing | Whether you can explain why zero-delay RTL hides a race that real delays expose. |
Whether you understand that coverage measures what was sampled, not what was checked. |