1st interview: Company fit with HR 2nd interview: 2 options provided i.e. take home assessment to work on for 7 days or live LeetCode. I chose take home to show my capabilities. It was a Spring Boot app to create a robot factory and they said something you would be happy to put into Prod but it didn't have a DB and not allowed to connect to one. I was too excited and over engineered it trying to show my Java black belt with design patterns.

Don't do that! Follow KISS design principle. They pay good attention to that and rightfully so. I had a different frame of mind then and questioned the engineers' response to my tech interview. We went back and forth in the discussions on email. They were polite in doing so and I got convinced where I had gone wrong even though the solution worked. I actually learnt a lot from that experience and have landed my next job :) somewhere else. Do what's needed as complex designs make it harder to maintain. Also pay attention to thread safety. All the best.

Q: Tell us about your experience as a lead engineer where you work.