A recruiter reached out to me for a Staff Engineer position. I was open to a senior role too, in case the bar was too high for the Staff position.

Firstly, I had a hiring manager round, which was okay. After that, I had a technical assessment round where I was asked to implement a stock-update problem.

I discussed my solution, which may not have been optimal but should have been working. The problem description was quite wordy, and I had to come up with all function signatures and assumptions. I started the conversation and began coding in parallel. Before I could run it, time was over.

Over the call, it appeared that the interviewer was accepting it as a solution, but I finally received a rejection.

I don’t know if they were looking for fully production-ready code, but I would recommend future candidates to code faster to complete the task. I also have one suggestion for the interview panel: to keep expectations realistic.

Stock change question and get statistics of data.