I was contacted by a recruiter and asked to complete a 70-minute CodeSignal test, which consisted of LeetCode-style(not on leetcode) problems.
Power Day Virtual Interviews:
Design a Banking App: This went fairly well. I thought I performed well, although using Zoom’s whiteboard feature was frustrating, to say the least.
Behavioral Interview: Pretty straightforward—standard questions like when you’ve learned something new, shifted priorities, or disagreed with a manager. Following the STAR method made this fairly simple.
Case Study: They described some apps and listed a few business use cases. I was also asked to identify bugs in the code. It was odd because they let you choose the programming language, but only part of the code was in my chosen language; the rest was in TypeScript/JavaScript.
Coding Round: I was asked to design a banking system (OO-based) with features like deposit, transfer, and retrieving the top N transactions. The implementation was left up to me, with minimal feedback from the interviewer. Toward the end (with about 10 minutes left), the interviewer remarked, rather condescending, "This would only work for a few records. What if I gave you millions of records?" He seemed to expect a multithreaded solution in a 50-minute coding session—which seemed unrealistic. I explained that, in a normal scenario, you'd not send in batch transactions like the scenario he presented and would have to consider server resources before implementing multithreading, this would be hard to do on a platform like CodeSignal. From his tone, it felt like the interview was just a formality.
A day or two later, I received a rejection email from the recruiter. No feedback was provided, but I was told I could re-interview in six months—if I was willing to take a full day off for it. They also mentioned that interviews could happen on any day, with only 24 hours' notice beforehand. There was a clear lack of respect for candidates' time, so needless to say, I’ll PASS.