After the first two phone rounds of interviews, one with the Hiring Manager and an initial screening round with an Architect, I was asked to come in for a day-long interview.

Nidhi explained that the interview pattern would consist of five rounds: three technical rounds, one director round, and one HR round.

The focus would be on:

• The current projects I am working on.
• Algorithms & Data Structures (no DP problems for an EM position).
• An architectural round.

On the interview day, the first two rounds were quite amusing. The so-called Principal Architects (both ex-Yahoo employees) possessed knowledge of technology from a bygone era. I was able to answer almost all their questions, yet they still rejected me after these two rounds. The Recruitment Coordinator informed me over the phone that there was a "misfit" and I was offered lunch before departing. I left immediately with no hesitation, to save my time and avoid any further due process.

Panel #1: This interviewer was Googling interview questions to ask me during our conversation.

The questions included:

• What is 'this'?
• What is a polyfill?
• What is TWA?
• What is a framework?
• Have you used Node.js?
• What are localization and internationalization?

He assumed I would be weak in architectural design and asked me to explain how to build an e-commerce application. After confirming with him that the requirements and focus were solely on the frontend, I began drawing the layout and explaining best practices in the design. He immediately interjected, saying, "I understand you're good at designing applications, but that's not what I wanted to know." He then asked me to explain how rendering happens. I explained rendering, first paint, and first meaningful paint, but he was clearly clueless. He then inquired about Nginx, Varnish, and how AWS things work. When I finally missed a few points and couldn't fully explain this flow, he seemed pleased and ended the interview.

Panel #2: This interviewer was polite and took me to the pantry, where we discussed our profiles. The questions he asked were:

• Explain Lerna and how it works (for two reasons: I had successfully implemented it in my recent organization, while they were unable to achieve the same after several attempts!).
• He understood the missing parts and thanked me for sharing the information.
• He asked about my work and a couple of questions to understand my tech-stack and hands-on experience.
• A couple of questions on SSR, and again, he thanked me for sharing my knowledge.

Problem Statement: Design a basic HTML layout with three tabs with navigation support without using JavaScript.

1. I provided a solution using CSS pseudo-selectors to toggle between the tabs.
2. He then requested that I not use CSS either. I proposed using a 'bookmarking' approach with div IDs.
3. He agreed, but what he was truly looking for was something like url/?(t1/t2/t3). I explained that this would require API calls every time a tab was toggled, which he acknowledged.
4. The next question was about XSS attacks: how to handle text like "alert(1);" in the comments of a blog page.
5. We discussed sanitization and best practices, and the round concluded. It appeared he already knew my candidature was being rejected!

*P.S.: I took some time to share my experience to save others their time. For the same reason, I have also shared the profiles of the interviewers.

I couldn't answer the infra-related questions on how the build process, Nginx, and other configurations were involved.