I applied through LinkedIn, and HR called to arrange an interview. I asked how long the interview process would take so I could manage my leave accordingly. She said it would take 4 hours.

The interview was arranged for 9 AM. I had taken a half-day leave from my office for that day.

One day before the interview, one HR colleague called at 4 PM and informed me to call his number once I reached the venue. He asked me to bring a laptop. I mentioned I didn't have a personal laptop, and he assured me they would arrange one for me.

On the day of the interview: I arrived before 9 AM. The HR took me to a room where he provided a paper with a printed design question. He said I needed to code on the laptop he provided.

The laptop had neither JDK installed nor any IDE. It was a fresh laptop from IT. When I tried to install, the laptop asked for administrator credentials. The HR took the laptop and informed me that he would fix it with the help of their IT. He would be back in some time.

IT installed JRE, which was not enough for any IDE. I repeatedly asked them to install JDK. It was 11 AM; two hours had passed, and they couldn't install JDK on the laptop.

Later, the HR came with a HackerEarth test on the laptop. He said there was no need to design anything now, and I just needed to appear for the HackerEarth test.

I informed him that writing on the HackerEarth platform is just like writing on a notepad. It would be very difficult to write runnable code with all tests passed on the HackerEarth platform. There was no debugger or compile-time error.

He said the hiring team was aware of this and would check the code.

I wrote the code. The logic seemed to be correct, but none of the test cases passed.

Lunch break. Half an hour's wait.

One tech guy came to discuss what I had coded. I explained the code. There was one mistake in one of the two problems, which would fail some test cases.

He later asked me an algorithm problem, specifically a Java concurrency problem. He seemed satisfied after the concurrency problem.

The HR then informed me that the manager would not go ahead. They advised me to bring my own laptop next time if any requirement arose from another manager.

It was 4 PM. The interview process, as initially informed by HR, was expected to complete in 4 hours.

Java Concurrency

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