I secured the interview through a staffing company. The initial call was with a recruiter to discuss my experience. They liked my background, and I then had a first-round interview with a Tech Lead. It focused primarily on my project experience, which I explained in detail. He asked a few good follow-up questions regarding my experience in specific areas, and everything went well up to that point.

The next round, a few days later, was a coding interview with the same person. He asked me to print the contents of an N-ary tree, which I did using both recursive and iterative solutions. I presented the recursive solution first, followed by the iterative one.

I was able to write the entire logic and all correct syntax on a notepad. (Yes, notepad! It was supposed to be on CoderPad, but at the last minute, he switched to a plain text pad instead.) I received voluntary hints from him once or twice during the interview, which I did not ask for.

At the end, he showed some positive vibes about my final solution, but then asked if I had any questions.

I became a little suspicious about whether he was truly satisfied with my solution or if something had gone wrong.

A few days later, I received a standard email stating they were moving forward with other candidates. Really? What else were they expecting?!

With so much IT experience, I've observed that employers' expectations are becoming increasingly unreasonable (in my opinion). First, they ask you to solve a problem that you would never encounter in real work. Then, they require you to solve it in an editor (CoderPad, HackerRank, etc.) that you don't use at work (our preferred IDE is much more comfortable and faster for obtaining solutions, especially when time is a constraint). They then ask us to solve a problem that reasonably takes 1-2 hours to complete within 30 minutes.

Now, they are asking to solve a coding problem on a word doc/notepad (due to COVID) with all correct syntax. I know this is similar to a whiteboard, but typically, based on my experience, they don't expect 100% correct syntax on a whiteboard. Furthermore, there are system design interviews where the expectation is to provide a complete solution (DB design, API design, component diagrams, and explanations of design considerations like Scalability, Availability, Throughput, Consistency, Partitioning logic, etc.) within 30-40 minutes. Lol...

What's next? You'll be given a problem and expected to explain the solution in 3 minutes or you're out. I know that was sarcasm, but you get the idea.

Finally, in my opinion, the worst part is when we ask for feedback after the interview, we never get any. How are we supposed to correct our unknown mistakes (if any)? At the very least, it would be helpful if they could provide some indirect hints.

This particular recruiter was least helpful from the beginning. He didn't even answer when I asked him what to expect during the interview—system design or DS&A coding problems. But no response. (Most employers provide that information these days.)

This is a long story, but I hope it helps someone.

Print contents of an N-ary tree.