The first step was a phone screening, which involved a vague design question. You were expected to ask questions and build up a solution; it was pretty simple.

Next, there was a virtual on-site. It started with a coding session where you were asked a LeetCode-style question and a simple design question. Nothing was difficult there.

Following that was a Design Interview, which should have been easy. My issues stemmed from the fact that I wasn't allowed to think about the design holistically. The interviewers directed me to make assumptions about miscellaneous parts being implemented, which derailed my thoughts.

Time was then wasted focusing on my table structure (which I thought would have taken 5 minutes; perhaps they were unaware of the functionality within relational databases and how to chain stored procedure calls). This prevented me from progressing to the core of the design. I had no time to expand on any ideas, discuss separation of concerns, design microservices, or take into account different user/client experiences, request concurrency and potential conflicts/resolutions, or push/pull updates. Overall, it was a poor experience with the design interview, and I knew from there that it was over.

It seemed to me that the interviewers might never have conducted a system design interview before. In hindsight, the problem seemed less like a system design question and more like they wanted to see a simple OOP model with the implementation of two methods, which contradicted the information sent out prior to the interview.

Everyone I interacted with was very pleasant. Had I received an offer, I would have definitely enjoyed working with them.

Maze problem: seeing if you can reach the end within n steps.

Simple design question tracking information in an array and map.

"Design" a popular application and implement two methods.