The interview process was absolutely horrible, especially the interviewers. I already knew about the work environment in the company, and so I was not surprised, but I was shocked at how the interaction with the interviewers was.
The first round was a telephonic round. The interviewer was a rude guy, and seemed to be taking the interview just for a formality. The questions ranged from literally everything that I had learned/not learned in my professional and student life. Though I had explicitly stated that I had no prior experience with DevOps and UI processes, I was being pestered with condescending questions. I was asked if I knew Docker, Kubernates, Linux Scripting, Javascript, Encryption techniques using RSA and AES, and was also condescendingly remarked as if I lied about some Volunteer work that I mentioned on my Resume.
Of course, I was also asked if I had worked on my technologies that I had mentioned and I satisfactorily answered those, but apparently that was not enough. The interviewer wanted to know aspects of the System I hadn't worked on. When the interviewer was done with his police-type interrogation, he asked if I had some questions, and of course I did. But the interviewer didn't even care to answer it in any way saying "I cannot disclose it", and then forcibly making the conversation end by saying "I'm done from my side". This was a Red flag for me.
I was not surprised when I was invited by the HR for the face to face rounds of interviews - I knew I had done well. To my disappointment though, the one who took my telephonic interview was the same one starting with the first round. And my fears about the company were confirmed. I was asked to print a Binary Search Tree in sorted order, and I promptly explained and wrote the code to print all the elements. Unfortunately, the interviewer was again uninterested with the recursive approach that I had written, and he frankly didn't even understand it. He constantly asked me where I had stored the previous node of the Tree, and I replied that the context is stored in a stack frame, but to no avail. I tried explaining him thrice, but he still didn't understand. Another red flag - I don't want to get into a company where people are thick in their head and adamant enough to not listen to an already well known approach. Even school kids know recursive DFS nowadays.
He followed it up with another question: "Given random tickets, find the source and destination". Well if you're wondering how to make head or tails out of this question, you aren't the only one. I had to ask him to elaborate the question, and he wasn't even forthcoming with it. I then understood what he wanted me to do, which is "Given a bag of unsorted tickets of a journey, find the original source and final destination". Well this didn't seem like a particularly difficult problem either, I explained how the original Source could not be the destination in any ticket, nor the final destination could be the source in any. I again wrote the code mentioning the logic above. Guess what, he wasn't satisfied with this either. I told another approach, but he didn't budge. That killed my mood - I definitely didn't want to join now. He followed up with some other Java/Hibernate/Spring Boot questions which he had already asked me in Telephonic round. He wanted a particular type of answer with each of his questions, it looked like. Most questions were however were not the areas I had worked in, and I told him so. His response was that I have very less project experience and that I don't know most stuff.
The 2nd round was with a good guy, this seemed like an actual discussion. We discussed various system design scenarios, like how'd I generate transactionIds, load balance a service, some core Java concepts, etc.
The 3rd round was with the Manager of the department and most of it was about how cool the company is, and how flat a hierarchy it has. Was also told to my face how his colleagues and him though I was a very average candidate (Why were they even proceeding with the interview then?), and that I looked like I wanted to learn. Long story long, it was an absolute waste of my time, I had to take a leave from my current org just to attend interviews. They seemed to be looking for very desperate candidates, because the guy flat out asked me if I'll join if given offer, or that I'll require time to consider. I ofcourse replied I'd need the time.
HR called up the next week and said my appointment was put on hold, and asked me if I'd like to interview again with other stakeholders for the same role.
