I was already a bit skeptical applying, seeing so many negative interview experiences on Glassdoor. But I still went ahead just to see for myself.

They initially wanted to schedule two rounds, Machine Coding as well as System Design, on the same day, which they said would take more than two hours each. I requested them to have only one round first (thankful that I saved my time).

The problem statement itself was just one line. So I started asking more questions on it, like what is the interface like, what features do you want me to add, would this be read-heavy or write-heavy, etc., since nothing was provided to me. This itself took half an hour, combined with the connectivity issue that one of the interviewers was facing.

So, finally, they said, "Start coding." I started by clearly mentioning what data structures I would be using, what classes I will create, and so on. I was told, "Please take 45 minutes alone and come up with a solution." I thought it was a bit strange, but okay, since in interviews, one usually wants to talk through all the steps they are doing. Then, about 15 minutes later, they gave me the full requirement with what is expected out of the system, what features need to be implemented, etc. I thought, "Yes, finally, more clarity."

About an hour after I started, they unmuted themselves and asked me to show the progress. I was almost done, so I asked for five more minutes and showed them the full, complete solution. They asked me to test out various test cases and checked if all the requirements were met. I met all the requirements and demonstrated every use case. So, we finished about 10 minutes ahead, and towards the end, it was just questions about the company, etc.

Final feedback after the interview:

• The candidate was unclear about the problem statement and took time to understand but got clarity after the requirements were specified. (This got me so infuriated. I got a one-line question, and how was I supposed to assume all the requirements?)
• Not enough entities created. (Pretty subjective, since I did use multiple classes and objects, but okay.)

Positives:

• Good use of interfaces.
• Good edge case and error handling.
• Met all the specified requirements of the problem presented.

Final Result - Rejected

If someone gave me the question again, I would probably do it the same way again. They expect the exact solution that they thought in their mind; any deviation and it's a reject. Plus, the interviewers had limited ideas of what I was doing since I was coding in Java, and they only knew GoLang. I had told about this to the recruiter as well, plus the interviewers themselves said I could use any language.

Q. Create an in-memory SQL-like DB.

That's it. I had to keep asking more and more questions like what operations do they expect, how should schema work, and would it be read or write heavy (so I can use appropriate data structures). My clarifying questions, in fact, became the major negative feedback against me.