The recruiter reached out to me via LinkedIn. We had a quick conversation over the phone, followed by four coding questions (LeetCode easy and medium).

Then came the "Power Day," which had four sections: Design, Coding, Behavioral, and Case.

Design: My interview was supposed to start at 9:00 am, but the interviewer didn't show up until 9:08. He then joined over the phone with no apology. I couldn't hear anything (I had tested my system over Zoom, and mine was working fine). He asked me to restart my system twice via chat, though the issue was on his end. He then started the problem statement over the phone without any introduction or apologies.

• Problem: Design a banking system with authentication and authorization. It would have four different account types: checking, saving, mortgage, and auto loan.
• Features:
  • A transfer feature where you can transfer from checking to saving and vice versa.
  • Transfers to external services like Zelle.
  • Transaction history.

Initially, he asked for a component diagram in CodeSignal (which was a bit difficult for me to find symbols for). While I was working on it, he changed it to a DB schema. While I was working on the DB schema, I was running out of time, so I asked if I could jump back to components. He then changed it to the tech stack for each component. I was explaining, but I had already run out of time. The second interviewer (for the coding section) joined the call.

Coding: It was an easy problem: find two numbers in an array whose sum is closest to 0. I hadn't checked Glassdoor before the interview, but it looks like this was their favorite question. I provided a solution within 15 minutes using a two-pointer approach. The interviewer then changed it to find the pair whose closest sum is 5. That was an easy tweak; I updated the existing logic in another 1-2 minutes. I had 25 minutes left, so I discussed their culture and expectations.

Behavioral: This section was easy and straightforward, with three questions like "tell me about a situation."

Case: It was an easy release cycle-related case where I had to fix existing code that was giving the wrong output.

Overall, it went fine for me, except for the design section, which I could have done better with more time. Later, I received an email from the recruiter stating that I had great communication and coachable skills but lacked coding (really?) and design skills.

Find two elements of an array whose sum is closest to 0.

Find two elements of an array whose sum is closest to 5.