First round was a Karat interview, which is an interview as a service. I have personally given more than 50 interviews in my career, I will rank this the worst by far.

The whole interview is split into 30 min System Design and 30 min "DSA" problem solving I was asked to design an EV charging station app to find the nearest station and process payments. The interviewer spent precious time explaining basic whiteboard box-and-arrow tools, leaving almost zero time for actual design. I laid out a standard architecture: API Gateway, Load Balancer, and dedicated microservices (Payment, Location/Proximity, User Mgmt).

The Problem: There was zero healthy conversation. When I tried to explain service responsibilities, the interviewer just rushed me into a checklist of generic component questions. I pointed out single points of failure with the load balancer and discussed using idempotency keys for the payment service. Silence. None of it registered. No follow-ups. No interest in actual engineering trade-offs.

DSA (30 mins): The interviewer explicitly said they didn't want an optimized solution—just code that works. I started brainstorming a DFS approach. They cut me off and told me to just write a simple function using Maps. There was no room to break down the problem into clean, maintainable Objects.

The Java Tax: Because I used Java, just typing out the verbose boilerplate and data structure declarations ate up half the remaining time crunch. It became glaringly obvious they didn't care about extensibility or maintainability. They just wanted someone to code a hacky script as fast as possible.

Please design an EV charging station finder API.