Intuit | Senior SWE | Onsite | Rejected

Hi everyone, I had a hard time finding details about the interview round prior to mine. Hopefully this can help others. I had a virtual on-site round with Intuit for Senior...

Hi everyone,
I had a hard time finding details about the interview round prior to mine. Hopefully this can help others.

I had a virtual on-site round with Intuit for Senior SWE. It consists of following rounds -
1. Craft preparation (90 mins)
2. Craft Demo (1hr) (Panel of - 3 SWE + 1 Manager)
3. Break (30 mins)
4. Tech round (1hr) ( with 2 of the SWE from panel)
5. Tech round (45 mins) (with Staff SWE from panel)
6. Behavior round(30 mins) (with Manager from Panel)

Before the interview, I was told to have a database and IDE of my choice ready. I was also given a glider link. I was expecting them to ask me to build a full stack application. Therefore I created a basic React app with Node/express backend and connected it with MYSQL that I was running locally. Nobody told me to do that, I just had it ready in case and thank god I did because they gave the similar prompt that they give other candidates (candidates who get 1 week to prepare). They were okay with me continuing with that basic code and build on top of it for the next 90 mins, while I shared my screen on zoom.

Prompt: Build an app like Upwork where users can post jobs and other users can bid on jobs.

You should be able to get that prompt online if you searched. Key points and how I approached it -
1. I did not want to get into login and signup stuff for the 2 kinds of users. So I decided to just have different views/pages in React to explain user specific functionality
2. I wanted to implement proper backend components like models, routers and classes (which they expected), but with limited time ended with just hardcoded url api calls
3. I started with creating the tables, because I knew I will not be able to complete everything, but if I had tables populated, atleast I could explain them what I had envisioned
4. I prioritized having one thing done end-to-end so I implemented the jobs list. I was fetching jobs from my database and displaying in the react app.

The 90 mins went by so quick. I honesty had nothing to show. The one table that I had was just raw data. I did not have the time to style it with bootstrap. Forget the tests. The expectation is to write industry standard code and what I had, I would not even put on my github. 90 mins is not sufficient.

Demo round: Panel of 4 drilling me on every choice I had made building the app. Their questions were good. They were under the assumption that I had 1 week to prepare and were not at all impressed by what I had, but once I told them that I build that in 90 mins they were more interested and receptive. They were very positive and nice during the interview. I answered all kinds of questions, they pointed out a few mistakes in my database design (I forgot to add a created_on field, which would have eventually helped me in sorting job posts). They asked questions about pagination, authentication, jwt, scalability like microservice architecture, basically everything you can think off. They asked me to implement create job API call right there. I think I did really well on the demo round.

Tech Round 1: They asked me to implement \'top 10 jobs\' board. After clarifying questions, they wanted me to use created_on attribute to sort jobs. I implemented that with some struggle. Then they asked me questions outside the Craft. They asked me to open glider and implement some javascript things like callbacks and function chaining, setInterval kinda questions. I made many syntax mistakes on glider and wasn\'t able to answer everything.

Tech Round 2: I was asked some followup on my Craft, asked to write SQL join queries and later given a leetcode question of monotonically increasing stack (find second largest element in list) . I was going to implment that but I started with stating the brute force and non optimal solutions.Then when I was struggling a bit to implement the stack, the interviewer suddenly asked me to implement the sorting approach. Which was just 2 lines. I don\'t know if they were fedup of me struggling and wanted to end it quick but that\'s how it went.

Behaviour Round: Typical story kind of questions. It felt more like a conversation. The manager gave me some feedback on Craft.

After being ghosted by recuiter for a week(that\'s a trend at Intuit) and sending multiple emails requesting a response, they told me I was

rejected. I have mixed feelings about the interview
1. I think the overall interview was a good experience. I am very proud of my skills and the way they questioned me on everything, I would have felt really worthy if I had the offer. I definitely prefer it over leetcode questions that are not related to what we actually work on.
2. I would have done great if I had more time for the Craft. The panic about \'others are asked to complete this in 1 week\' took over me.
3. The good thing is as a candidate you can completely drive this kind of interview. I wanted to discuss scalability and design so the interview went in that direction. Not once in the 5.5 hours we spoke about testing. Just a tip for others.
4. There are many areas that I have to improve on, full-stack is hard. There are so many things to take care of and having utmost grasp on everything is crucial and expected.
5. I asked for detailed feedback post rejection and the recuiter called me and told me everything they thought about during the interview. Kinda sad but I really appreciate the feedback. I know what I have to work on next.