I had an online coding round for screening, followed by an onsite interview. There were several others, 10-15 candidates, who interviewed at the NetApp office along with me.

I had two coding rounds:

Round 1 - Find the local minima. I gave a simple iterative solution. Then, the interviewer asked me to optimize it using an approach similar to binary search. For example, in the array 11, 40, 13, 60, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, if the middle element is not a local minima, check its left element. If the left element is greater, move to the right as it is smaller. Then, in the right subarray after 9, perform the same steps. After a few minutes of convincing her that this wouldn't work as the array has to be sorted, I gave up and wrote the recursive code as she wanted. The next question was to reverse a linked list. I took some time but was able to complete the reverse function.

Interview 2 - Given a number n, convert all numbers from 1 to n into their binary representation and count the total number of 1s. For example, if the input is 5, convert numbers from 1 to 5 into binary and count all the 1s.

I solved it.

Ignoring the fact that one question from the interviewer was itself wrong, I was feeling good about the interview regarding the first optimization question.

The same interviewers interviewed another candidate and asked the same local minima and linked list questions. So, it seemed they had only a few questions prepared for everyone.

The next strange thing was that they conducted managerial rounds for all candidates since the morning. I was among the last three candidates scheduled. So, we waited until after 6 PM for our managerial round, expecting to get that interview. They came after 6 PM and said there was negative feedback from the manager. To this, we asked, but we didn't even have the managerial round. The recruiter fumbled a bit and said the manager took feedback from the tech round interviewers.

Another point: everyone before us three got a managerial round, and except for one in my knowledge, all were called for an HR round the next day as they were selected. Another point to note was that all the guys had mixed tech interviews; some even had bad rounds, but they got selected. One among the last three candidates was exceptionally good, but strangely, all three candidates at the end who didn't have a managerial round received negative feedback from the manager. FYI, we didn't see the manager, nor did he see us.

FYI, the guy who had the same panel as me was a fresher, and he was about to leave as the manager said he didn't have development experience, as he interned in QA. Just while leaving, he was called and informed that he was selected. Lucky for him, he was from the morning batch.