I applied through an employee referral. The recruiter sent me a coding challenge on Talscale. After completion, I received another coding challenge on HackerEarth, followed by a phone call screening. Later, the recruiter informed me that I was shortlisted and asked me if I could participate in a two-day hackathon. When I asked the recruiter that I had already taken two online tests, she responded by saying only one was meant to be sent and two were sent by mistake, which was the first red flag.

The two-day remote hackathon setup included Slack and Google Meet. The company created a Slack setup for all applicants. There were two rooms: one common room with all other participants and company employees, and one personal room with you and a company employee. Day 1 started with a 1.5-hour introductory session from the founder of the company on a Google Meet call in which they pretty much described all the projects that they have. This was followed by a common problem for around twenty-four participants, and the problem was sent in the common Slack room. No specified time limit or any other instructions other than that you can talk to your interviewer in your personal channel were given. We had to solve the problem and communicate via Slack in our personal room. There were no phone calls or video calls whatsoever. Suddenly, in the middle of the hackathon, the recruiter messaged on the Slack channel that you could submit your first part of the problem before lunch, which was also not mentioned before. The only mode of communication with the interviewer was Slack.

I completed my code and submitted both parts before the first break, but the interviewer kept on arguing about the implementation they wanted to see on Slack. Nobody proposed to have a call, and there were multiple people talking to you at the same time with their own different views. The method they wanted me to implement was highly inefficient. I gave them multiple examples of how that idea was a big failure, and they just stopped replying on chat. I tried asking them multiple times to let me know what they think about it, and they just stopped replying. After some time, the recruiter just called saying sorry you are not shortlisted even before the hackathon was finished. She didn't even have a valid reason to tell me why, which was absurd. The whole process had so many flaws and a lot of time wasted.

Locking and unlocking in n-ary tree.