The second interview involved a take-home assignment. They asked me to build a website that shows the surge factor and congestion factor at each geohash within a city. The data needed to be generated by a producer, sent through a pipeline such as Kafka, and consumed by a consumer.

I wondered if any undergrads actually know this stuff. Anyway, I slogged it out for three whole weeks to build this. As it turns out, they only looked at ten lines of my entire application. What an amazing way to burn three weeks of time! I could have created a static website and pretended that I actually did it.

Not to mention, they started the interview twenty minutes late and made no attempt to be apologetic. They also didn't bother getting back to me on the result of the interview. Since like six weeks have passed, I'm assuming I didn't make it.

How do you design a system to find the average speed of all cars in the city?