I interviewed with Rubrik in August 2020. A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn and scheduled the first screening round. He told me that it would be based on concurrency programming, so I took about a week to brush up on multithreading concepts.

Now, coming to the interview, the interviewer joined the call 10 minutes late to start with. He asked me to design a solution and code a problem involving multithreading. I initially gave a slightly sub-optimal solution (which was working, by the way), but he pointed it out, and I corrected it to make it optimal. The interviewer even said, "I am pretty much satisfied with your solution" at the end of the interview and closed the call 5 minutes early.

The worst part about this interview experience was the recruiter. I didn't receive any call in the next 3 days, so I called to follow up myself. Upon which, he said that my round didn't go well. I insisted on being told the feedback from the interviewer, which he said he didn't have and would get back to me. I waited for 3-4 days again with no response. I had to follow up 3 times and kept insisting on feedback because I was able to solve the problem. In the third follow-up, he said the interviewer gave negative feedback, stating that I took a lot of time to solve the problem and the code had a few bugs. I was baffled to hear this, as the interviewer had himself approved my solution.

My question to the interviewer is: if he wanted to ask more questions, why did he join 10 minutes late and finish 5 minutes early? If there were bugs, why didn't he point them out at that time and use the last 5 minutes to correct those?

I agree the company has the right to decide whom to hire, but as a candidate, what I want is a transparent process where timely feedback is provided to me instead of me having to follow up with the recruiter after the interview. That's what makes a good or bad experience. And this was certainly a bad one.

The Multi-threaded Producer-Consumer Problem