I was approached by an HR representative from Dell Malaysia to recruit for a Staff Engineer position on the Cyber Security Team in Singapore.

It was a long interview process, including four rounds: three technical rounds followed by one HR round.

• The first round was with a panel of two Staff Engineers from Singapore, assessing my current work experience and problem-solving skills through an algorithm.
• The second round was with a panel of two Staff Engineers, including one from Israel and another from Singapore. The interview involved solving two system design problems within a two-hour duration.
• The third round was with HR, where they asked about my expectations and explained benefits.
• The fourth round was with the Hiring Manager and a Staff Engineer from Singapore. This was a behavioral interview.

There was a gap of more than a week between each interview.

After the four rounds of interviews, I did not hear back from HR for two weeks. When I followed up, HR finally called me from Singapore and informed me that they were unable to hire for the Staff Engineer position. They offered a lower-level role with less salary and fewer benefits than my current position, which I was not interested in at all.

Overall, I felt it was a hectic interview. I invested a lot of time and energy in interview preparation over the last two months.

I suggest my fellow friends not to waste their valuable time attending these hectic interviews with Dell, only to face disappointment in not getting hired.

First Round: Question on Java program and finding the 5th largest element from an array.

Second Round:

1. Implement a REST API for an Airlines system to show the best airline fare for a week, where data is fed by different airline systems with millions of records.
2. Implement an LRU cache using a HashMap and LinkedList.

Manager Round:

1. What are the best qualities of a software engineer, and what are their strengths?

2. Implement a REST API for showing the best fare in a week given source, destination, and date.

3. LRU cache implementation using Java.

4. Find the 5th largest element from an integer array.

5. Can a compiler provide a default constructor if there is a constructor with arguments?