I am regularly going for interviews currently, and my experience has never been this pathetic. I went for an interview last Saturday.

In the email communications, it was mentioned that the first round would be on DS/Algorithm. Two interviewers came and told me that they both would be asking questions. One of them started with a DS/Algorithm question.

I clearly told them I'll take some time and then explain the approach I was thinking. It was a 2D array question which I solved with BFS, and I told the interviewer that it could also be solved with DFS. I had some follow-up questions regarding the problem and asked them. The interviewer was least interested in clarifying those. This is a general practice in interviews where dialogue is from both ends, not just one. An interview is not a war of words but a discussion. Both of them didn't really understand this.

I felt their sole purpose was to prove that they knew a lot and the interviewee didn't. I am pretty sure both of them didn't have good industry experience. They didn't know how to ask questions in an interview.

I was asked five DS/Algorithm questions, and I answered all of them. I wrote end-to-end code when they asked me to. In between, they were asking some random questions from different topics like Java, Big Data, SQL, and Design. I answered those, but they were probably expecting me to say the same words they wanted to hear.

Another annoying part was that after asking an algorithm question, they both started talking to each other, which was so disturbing. Still, I managed to think and answered.

Finally, I received feedback that it was negative. I have faced interviews in the past as well, but I didn't feel what I felt here. They didn't have any motive behind the questions they were asking. After each question, they just expected me to start answering. This is not how it works. People take a few minutes at least to think and come up with an approach. After each question, I was telling them, "Let me think and draw the approach, then I will explain."

There was no proper sequence of question areas – they were just randomly asking questions. An interviewer should also know what they want to understand by asking certain questions.

Questions similar to finding Islands in a 2D array. Implementation similar to a web crawler. Find all ancestors of a given node in a binary tree. Longest path in a binary tree. Related: depth of a binary tree. Check if two strings are anagrams.