My experience: 17 Years Specialization: Engineer Chapter Lead/Vice President( in Banking GCC Terminology) My present employer Tech Stack: Java Spring Boot for the micro service design/development, Redhat OpenShift for contenarisation of micro service, Kubernetes for the Orchestration, Secure Code practice such as Blackduck, Checkmarx, Twistlock, Usage of RDBMS such as Oracle, No SQL DB such as Mongo, Application design involving REST API, Batch, Event Based. What do I do on day to day basis: Responsible for the application design for specific business use case, code review, performance analysis, Constant thinking for the betterment of the solution in the landscape, regular technology/product evaluation, involvement in strategic initiatives, vendor resource management, Full time employe e management etc I had applied for the role of Staff Engineer on their website( Not through third party job sites) I had initial exploration call ( 30 Minutes) with hiring manager in which he talked about the current requirement for which this hiring is conducted and as an employer - he also used this opportunity to know my current roles/responsibilities Next round was coding interview where an interviewer gave me two DSA problem statements verbally over zoom call and the expectation was to solve it using screen share within 1 hour( 30 Minutes for each problem) Well, I knew that there would be coding interview - I was not sure about the format in which this would be conducted. Some organization would do via third party platform, some organizations would ask a problem statement and they might want to evaluate the candidate’s thought process, logical and analytical thinking. I was surprised with the format for two reasons. 1. On a real world, I do not spend time in solving some hypothetical puzzles to sharpen my skills. The industry requirement is entirely different than this hypothetical puzzle 2. In a world of AI, online assistance, coding without using help is outdated However I have told interviewer that I do not spend my time day to day dealing with solving DSA related puzzles, I took some time to arrive at the possible solution. I did not arrive at the possible solution within the timeframe. Well I had started my career as a developer and crossed stages such as senior developer, lead developer, application lead etc. Going back to the same evaluation as that of early career level for staff/principal engineer did not make much sense to me. If one is an architect/staff/principal engineer - they involve in different use case rather than sitting and thinking over arriving at the code level solution.

It was okay in the beginning. I went into their interview process for 4 rounds. Everybody I met was a good solid engineer but the last guys who interviewed me had very egoistic and keep interrupting me while doing the design discussion. He was a principal engineer and sort of started by telling his seniority.