A recruiter reached out to me to have a chat about whether I'd be interested in applying for a role at Capital One. After that, the bulk of the interview process was:

1. Online coding assessment with 4 problems and a 70-minute time limit. Completing all problems isn't required; you just need to achieve a minimum passing score and write consistent, quality code. Once you pass, you'll move on to scheduling the "Power Day."

2. Power Day Part 1: Algorithm Technical - Count the number of primes (similar to a LeetCode problem).

3. Power Day Part 2: System Design - Design a smart meter system for an apartment complex.

4. Power Day Part 3: Behavioral - Three questions were asked:

   • Tell me about a time when priorities changed and how you handled it.
   • Describe a situation where you successfully overcame a blocker and completed a task on time.
   • Explain how you worked with a difficult team member and made the situation workable.

5. Power Day Part 4: Technical Case - Discussed the pros and cons of Capital One investing in a virtual chat system powered by machine learning (ML). We covered what kind of data would be useful to feed that ML model, walked through some code that creates a list of most recent events from a table, and discussed how to handle updating the code to support reading a different amount of events based on the object.

I was rejected a few days after the Power Day via an email that simply read, "Thank you for your interest... [but] we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates at this time." I received no real feedback from a recruiter about how the process went. It would be nice to show empathy and reject someone with a personal email from the recruiter, providing feedback on how the process concluded from their perspective.

Count the number of primes up to and including N. (204 on LeetCode)

Design a smart meter system that measures electricity usage and reports the measurement every minute to a central service. Tenants and building managers should be able to view this data on a website, with the ability to view it by hour, day, week, month, and any interval in the past.

Tell me about a time priorities changed and how you handled it.

Tell me about a time you successfully overcame a blocker and delivered a feature on time.

Tell me about a time when you had to work with someone difficult and how you made it workable.

What are some pros and cons of Capital One investing in a virtual chatbot, and what kind of data would be useful to feed the machine learning model for it?