I got a call from Rakuten, Bengaluru.

First round: HackerRank test Time: 120 min 4 simple algorithm questions, but most time was consumed in idiotic BigInteger and long test cases. HackerRank/HackerEarth sometimes provide good DS/Algo questions, but their test cases are a nightmare, since they include huge numbers (which cannot be accommodated in the int datatype).

Round 2: Interview by a 5-year experienced guide. The discussion included some 3-4 LeetCode easy-medium questions, followed by Singleton design pattern, builder, and strategy design patterns. We also discussed making a class immutable. This round went well, as it was purely technical and the interviewer was helpful in providing hints.

Round 3: Interview with manager Arun Singhal (logistics team) was horrible. Looking at him, I got a feeling that he was a maintenance manager or from customer support. During the interview, he asked me to share a notepad from my computer (very unprofessional; it is courtesy to share a codepad link provided by the hiring team). His first question was "find a missing number from an array of 1 to n in O(log n)" without any inputs, only the problem statement was mentioned. At this moment, I realized that he had opened GeeksforGeeks or some online resource and shared the question. This is very unprofessional, as managers at such a reputed company like Rakuten pose questions and expect exact code. His next question was a simple query to fetch employees whose IDs don't begin with 1 or 2, with an exception for 1002 and 2001.

I had a really bad experience in the second round with the senior manager. Working for an e-commerce giant like Rakuten, you are not supposed to expect memorized questions from candidates. This shows that the team performed only patch works. Also, he mentioned that there are 8 teams, and the current team works with all 8 teams wherever a work requirement arises. He also iterated thrice that they work on Java-Spring-Kafka-Elasticsearch based on team requirements. Repeating things like this in an interview shows that you are trying to impose that the team works on these, but usually, this is a trap for candidates as we want to work on the best technologies. Man, this is a complete maintenance team.

Find the Kth largest element in an array (max-heap). Find the start of a rotated-sorted array.