I interviewed at J.P. Morgan Chase Nutmeg.

The interview questions were easy, but the process was very slow and took 2 months for 3 rounds.

The recruiter was VERY RUDE when she called, but scheduled the interviews.

The screening round was very easy. I forgot the question, but it was a simple one on parsing a string and storing it in a map, and doing some operation. The interviewer was polite.

Then came the second round. It was a medium-level question. An undirected graph was to be implemented and traversed.

• The addNode(String val) function would take a string value and add the node with that label.
• Similarly, there was a function to add edges between nodes. However, in this function, apart from adding the edge, we had to make sure that it was not creating any cycle.
• Then there was a traverse() function which would traverse the graph and print the nodes.

I could not write code for detecting cycles due to shortage of time, but I told the approach to detect a cycle. I finished other functionalities.

Then came the design round. The question was simple: Design a service to take user inputs (FirstName, LastName, email, Addresses) and perform CRUD operations in the backend.

(Follow-up: Extend this application to make another API call to an external service which would do a background check.)

However, I must mention that one of the interviewers was faking his accent and was asking follow-up questions on the design in a very condescending tone. One of the remarks passed by him was, "Let's not worry about cost, as we would be spending more money by talking about this (another EC2 instance) for another 10 minutes," and I could hear both interviewers giggling. Well, next time say the same thing to the higher management when a project budget is being discussed.

When I tried to understand the scale of this application in the beginning, he said, "Let's not worry about those details." Again, later when he asked me a follow-up question and wanted me to add another functionality to this application, I asked about the scale / number of requests per second. In his fake accent with a condescending tone, he said, "Let's not worry about these unnecessary details."

Scalability is not an unnecessary detail. Design decisions are made based on that.

Design rounds are meant to be abstract. There is a high chance that the candidate's design won't be exactly the same as you have in your mind.

At least let him/her think and explain calmly instead of trying to show off how smart you are. Instead of passing such remarks, try to understand the solution and make your decision after the interview.

It's completely OK to reject a candidate in an interview, but we should have a sense of empathy because, at the end of the day, he/she is a human under a lot of interview-induced stress and is not in a comfort zone like you are. The least you can do is be kind.

Overall, it was a very bad experience getting interviewed at Nutmeg Chase.

Forgot the question, but it was a simple one on parsing a string and storing it in a map, and doing some operation.