1. Recruiter screening - a basic call to discuss your background and interests.

2. HM - Had a poor experience in this one. He did not ask me a single question on my background and experience. Instead, he asked me a coding question and said he wanted to hire "rockstar coders". I discussed the approach but could not code it up completely. He still passed me to the next round.

3. Codility 2 rounds - I passed this one. Expect string manipulation, arrays, sets, and hashmap-related questions. If you pass this one, you get to the next three.

4. SRE - This went well and was mostly about how I managed reliability, fault tolerance, etc.

5. System design - The interviewer was very rude. He arrived about 7 minutes late. There were no apologies, and he directly jumped to the question, which is fair considering saving time. While I was thinking about an approach, he suddenly asked me, "Why did you apply when you have nothing about storage written in your resume?" I answered him as professionally as I could before jumping back to the question. I have been designing systems for the past several years, and my approach is what you find in YouTube videos (start with a data model and define core entities and build it up from there), but he did not like any of that. He kept arguing with me about nitpicky things, and half the questions were not clear about the direction he wanted to go. After 20 minutes, he went into "elder uncle" mode and said, "I will give you free advice," and talked in abstract terms about how to approach such questions. There are so many interesting things to cover: DB design, capacity planning, sharding, caching strategies, etc., and diving deep into each area. He did not cover and ask any of that. Overall, he kept arguing and constantly nitpicking throughout the interview without giving me a chance to showcase my skills to the best of my ability.

He has been a manager for 20 years, and I got the feeling he never designed a system before and did more "people" management. At Geico, he was given an elevated title of a "senior director," so what can you expect? If he is this rude and direct to a person meeting for the first time, I can't imagine how people reporting to him must be feeling.

1. People skills - I gave answers in STAR format for this interview, but the interviewer was a less experienced manager expecting some strange answers rather than the story, technical challenges, and outcomes. He was more interested in my convincing skills, feelings of your colleagues, how you tackled disagreements, etc. Questions were on "feelings" and "communication" like in a dating context. At one point, I told him I am an engineer and not a salesperson because my job is to present data, give opinions based on experience, and drive things.

I got a feeling that Geico tech is a mess. Rather than going with a public cloud and optimizing costs there, they are building their own. Who builds their own these days, including storage systems? It seems like they have hired people with big egos from big tech wanting to prove themselves rather than anything else. I can bet with the people leading this today that they are going to cancel all this effort within 2 years and go back to where it all started. Check Reddit, where it talks about stack ranking and toxic culture at Geico tech.

I will never consider Geico for insurance after going through some of the most disrespectful people. I can't trust them when you need them the most in your life.

Design an autocomplete search feature for system design.

Print boundary nodes in a binary tree.