The interviewers were very young children, interviewing senior developers. Some of the children appeared to have an overwhelming amount of arrogance coupled with an underwhelming IQ level. I asked one of them for some water, and he actually said there was no bottled water on that floor and that we could just get it after the interview. A cup and a water cooler would have sufficed. That gave me an unsettling idea of what I was dealing with.

The biggest issue I had was with the elevator design question. I actually did very well on the hands-on coding exercise. I don't know how I did on the algorithm question; I thought I did well, but that could just be my opinion.

For the elevator design question, my mistake may have been coming up with a very elaborate design. Unfortunately, the interviewer wanted me to write some very specific code on the whiteboard, possibly some trivial queue processing code. I have more than a decade's worth of experience designing scalable and fault-tolerant systems but was unable to prove that to him. This interviewer had a very thick accent, and communication with him was rather confusing. He said this was an open-ended design question, but I am guessing he thought this question had only one answer in the form of some simple code on the whiteboard.

I am very glad I didn't get the job (and this is not sour grapes). The work culture appeared to have subtle signs of toxicity. From the discussion with one of the developers, it appears the codebase is a giant, monolithic mess which they are trying to desperately untangle.

However, if you are enticed by unlimited candies, free exotic soft drinks, and free food, then just practice the answers to these three simple questions (they actually can't come up with new questions):

• Elevator design (50 floors, 4 elevators)
• Unival tree
• In-memory DB/cache

elevator design