Staff

I interviewed for this large tech company. Marketplace for old/niche products and what a royal mess that was. Recruiter reached out on LinkedIn, had initial chat then ghosted for 5 weeks. Mid-March, a different recruiter comes back saying they want to move fast. Reschedule interviews last-minute, send me wrong interview descriptions (more on that later), and generally ran the most chaotic process I've seen in entire career. They switched my first interview which was supposed to be behavioral but did not tell me. Here's how my loop went: First round - Interviewer joined and asked for my intro. I started from the beginning since it was a behavior round but the interviewer cut me off, asked me to hurry up and said we only have 45 mins and need to go to coding as well. I was like what coding. Anyways I started speaking fast but he kept cutting me off, I was kinda frustrated but went along. Problem - There are millions and billions of users and we want to store country -> business type -> list of features how would I do it. I said I will use a database, DynamoDb or Cassandra, its simple enough data, was cutoff and asked to not think about DBs just focus on class, I said how you gonna store this much data in class, was asked to forget about that as well just implement this class. I ended up using nested Map, then he asked me to implement the write path in thread safe way, I updated to concurrenthashmap and explained the locking mechanism. He asked a few other very vague questions like what did you do in last 30 days. Well I did some architecture, wrote some code, mentored juniors, unblocked peers, not sure what was that all about. Second round - I realized that they didn't switch the interviewers but the interviews and this was gonna be behavior round instead of data structure, it went fine normal discussion about my past work etc. Third Round -- Same story as first round. You have RabbitMQ with millions and billions of user activity and you want to show logs in a LIFO way, with just using poll/offer/size functions. I asked more details about where is the class and should I write code to connect to queue and do you want all that data in memory and was told to forget about the size requirement. I asked you want me to filter the user logs in memory. Millions and billions is a lot of data, was asked to not worry about that either. I have already lost like half the time at this point. Anyhow I implemented it with an Array then he gave me a hint to use 2 queues, I had already said it earlier I can put it in a queue but with this large data that would be very slow and he did not say anything earlier. I coded it up, didn't work and we were over time. He said he dint have my resume and if I have a public URL. I shared my screen and he looked at my resume for like 15 seconds and we said good bye. Fourth round -- Was pretty decent, interviewer was nice. It was on Design patterns and concurrency. I think I did well here. Had a decent chat with interviewer and a few laughs. Fifth round -- Supposed to be System design but was asked to implement a Trie. Interviewer was nice and helped me out. We were able to come up with a solution. At the end I told him I wasn't expecting coding in this round. He was surprised when I showed him schedule with his name against Architecture and performance tuning. He told me did not get the schedule I had, they asked him to take the interview and he only does coding round. Anyhow very bad experience. Got a rejection mail. Very happy about rejection. tl;dr : Very bad interview experience at large tech company. Recruiters mismanaged the whole thing. Interviewers didn't really know how to conduct/structure interviews. Was asked to introduce myself only to be cut multiple times and rushed as each interview was only 45 mins. No system Design during the loop. Dodged a bullet.