The talent acquisition team contacted me to interview for Software Engineer - Routing Protocol Development. I was very excited. I revised all my C/C++, data structure and algorithms, and networking concepts.

Round 1: Interviewer was not interested in pleasantries and dived right into my resume after a curt "Hello, I am... So, you work for..." Tell me about the unit tests that you have written for so and so module (Was mentioned in my resume). Tell me about the data structures you used in these unit tests.

Tell me about the modules that you refactored (Was mentioned in my resume). Which data structures did you use?

I tried to explain the reason for refactoring and the complexities involved in it. He did not seem to care. He was only interested in the "Data Structure" that I used.

Ok. Since this position is for C development, I will ask you questions in C.

He asked the following questions:

1. How do you delete a node in a singly linked list if you only have a reference to that node? No other info available.

2. Get the second and third bit of an integer from the left (endianness not mentioned). Now do some logical operation on these two bits to return something like this: unsigned int leftBit, rightBit; value = leftBit rightBit; switch(value): case 1: return "True"; case 0: return "False";

3. There is a table (Just think about user requirement, not to confuse with any Data structure) of values and function names: 1 --> function1() 2 --> function2() 3 --> function3() 4 --> function4()

Which data structure would you use to store this table?

1. Write the function f in the following program:

int * x; f(); printf("%p", x); // Output = Null

1. Why do you want to join Juniper? (Here comes the surprise) The mail that I got from Talent Acquisition clearly mentioned that the position is for Software Engineer - Routing Protocol Development. I started explaining about why I am excited to work in RPD and how it can help my career.

The interviewer interrupts me and says: Look, I will be honest with you. This position is not for RPD. In fact, nobody in this entire (Juniper) building works on RPD. My team works on layer 2 development and went on to describe the work (Basically, maintenance work).

Then, I realized why he was so interested in asking only about the unit tests that I had written, ignoring all the other things that I had done which were relevant to the RPD profile.

Round 1 ended after this. By this time, I was sure that I had been misled about the job profile. This interviewer says - Look, I am done with the interview. There is another round too. Please wait here.

Round 2: All of this process seemed like a formality by this time. I could see that they had no interest in my resume and they were asking random questions in C and "Data Structures".

1. Write a function to pass an array as a parameter and set the value of a specified index. Something like this..

void function(int index, int *a);

1. Create a structure to hold a bunch of information about an employee. e.g. employee ID (Unique) employee Name (Unique) employee Salary etc.

Which data structure will you use to store employees? Some discussion on time complexities.

Here comes the random questions again: 3. What is priority inversion? (OS question) 4. What is Process Scheduling? 5. Various algorithms for Process Scheduling 6. Interviewer wrote a C program to copy a character array into a character pointer using strcpy. Asked me what it does?

1. Different layers in OSI model
2. What is Data Link layer?

Round 2 is over.

While getting out, the HR person came and asked me how the interview went?? I asked him about the Job Profile and how the first interviewer was taken aback when I started discussing about RPD. He says - "Ok, Thank you for coming."

I said (In my mind): Well, thank you for wasting my time.