Overall, this was a big waste of time due to the take-home assignment. I was always in the process of rejecting take-home assignments. Now I feel bad that I said yes to their process and wasted so much time.

The very first round was a craft demo, which is a take-home problem followed by a design interview. The problem statement stressed the importance of working code as well as a design doc with an end-to-end design.

But the interview I had later did not go into the code part at all. Before I could explain the design doc, the panel dived deep into a small part. I explained choices at each step and the tradeoffs for each.

The interviewers only wanted to listen to the exact solutions they had in mind. They also gave feedback that I wasn't confident to stand by my design instead of giving different possibilities, when I was simply giving pros & cons of each approach and I did have a choice.

When I explained how data would be partitioned, they took issue with the term 'partitioning' itself, stating that what I was explaining wasn't that. However, partitioning is an overloaded term, and the explanation I was using was the one found in standard textbooks like DDIA.

Vehicle telematics backend design.