They called for SDE4 which is apparently equivalent to Architect internally.
Before coming for interview, I was given instructions to setup laptop with Web framework, database & IDE.
There were 3 rounds on same day. Interview was scheduled for 2.5 hours, but, went for almost 5-6 hours for me.
Long story short, I did not clear. First 2 rounds were good, 3rd one was not.
Round 1
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System design problem to track cabs & raise alarm if certain rules are met. This was easy for me & my design matched their current production setup.
Round 2
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1) Discussion around product & business
2) Given a maze, find shortest path to go from start to end. I made a mistake here to choose DFS & generate all paths, instead of obvious BFS. Anyways, interviewer seems satisfied
3) Asked to code on IDE - scrape stock prices from different stock trading platforms & show current latest price. I coded a small variant of this after discussing with interviewer & he seemed satisfied.
Round 3
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By this round, I was exhausted. First 2 rounds had overshot planned schedule and I should have stopped interview process at the time & asked for re-schedule. Unfortunately, I continued and suffered during interview process.
Interviewer asked for past experience on performance tuning. Then asked for a project plan to go from current architecture to ideal one. I was supposed to come up with complete project plan with milestones, devs/qa numbers, cycles etc. It just threw me off completely.
It did not help that the interviewer was a little bit rude during discussion.
Anyways. I gave some details but obviously was short.
Also, I made 2 observations on company business -
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1) There is a slowdown in B2B market since companies are actively reducing cab services (as a perk) to employees.
2) As a result. they are being forced to go into B2C business model, i.e. provide cabs on subscription model to general public. However, I am a bit skeptical on long term viability of this business model as existing cab aggregators can enter this market & capture it quite easily.
Overall experience
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Finally, my interaction with HR was NOT positive. I had to follow up personally by dropping email & then following up on call to check for outcome. HR needs to be more proactive than this.
Scheduled time should be honored & candidate time should be respected.
Interviewers should wait for explanation then ask more questions.