I wanted to jump straight into describing the case interview, since everything else was fairly standard.

The case interview was the fourth and final one of the so-called "Power Day" — and honestly, the most frustrating interview I’ve ever experienced in my life. The task itself was simple: a basic if-else logic problem that would take just a few minutes to code. But instead of writing code, I was asked to simulate everything mentally — reading an array of inputs and tracking outputs in my head, like a human compiler. The problem was intentionally tricky, filled with cases designed more to confuse than to test logic or skills.

After that, it got worse. In the next stage, I was given a poor-quality implementation and asked to find a bug — again, entirely in my head, without running or printing anything. It wasn’t about intelligence or software engineering; it was more of a memory test, trying to keep track of complex, nested if-else branches and refer back and forth to the problem description. By then, I was already drained from three previous interviews, so the experience felt especially exhausting and, frankly, pointless.

Now, stepping back to the beginning:

The process started when a recruiter reached out to me. After that came a 70-minute coding assessment with 4 LeetCode-style problems, ranging from easy to medium.

Then came "Power Day," consisting of four interviews:

• Technical
• System Design
• Behavioral
• Case

Technical: Standard object-oriented design. I was asked to model a banking system — accounts, deposits, transfers, top-N activities. The catch was that requirements kept being added one at a time, so I couldn’t plan or manage my time well.

System Design: A broader version of the banking system, with analytics requirements layered in. Again, fairly typical for a system design round.

Behavioral: Standard questions like handling disagreements with a manager, learning something new, or shifting priorities. This was actually the only round with a genuinely friendly and supportive interviewer.

Listed in the description above.