I applied through a friend.

The recruiters were wonderful in setting up interviews quickly. Their follow-ups were also within a day or two.

I had two telephonic interviews.

• The first was a very non-interactive one; the second was good.
• The first interviewer seemed not interested at all and was mostly working on their project while I was breaking my head over the question.

I explained the solution first and then started coding. The interviewer then pointed out that I did not understand the question after I had spent 10 minutes solving the problem. I later came to know that the interviewer had expressed an opinion that I did not understand the question. What a bummer.

As a person who has conducted thousands of interviews, I can say that the first one was either prejudiced or completely out of interest. The second interview was very interactive, and the interviewer was working along for most of the interview.

I think the first interview completely tipped off the decision.

Round 1 Q1 Given a log file with a list of tuples (TIMESTAMP, USER, PAGE_TYPE), where PAGE_TYPE represents the page visited. Form sequences of pages that a user had visited and then find the most common sequence.

The question was later changed to form triplets of sequences. For example, if the sequence is A->B->C->D->E->F, the triplet sequences would be:

A B C B C D D E F

and then find the most common sequence.

Round 2 Q1 An open-ended question: Given a scenario where you are batch processing and each entry takes more than 30 seconds to process, design a system to process a large volume of such data.

Round 2 Q2 The interviewer explained how radix sort works on integers and asked me to implement it.