Status: 2021 Grad
Position: Software Engineer at a decent company

The recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn on 11th Dec, 2021 and asked me if I'm interested in the opportunity.

ROUND-1 : Online Test

Someone from the recruitement team called on 13th Dec, 2021 for general inquiry like the current company, technologies I know, salary expectations, etc. He shared the link for online test on the same day and asked me to attempt it as soon as possible.

• Longest subarray with at most 2 distinct values (although, original problem was worded differently).

My solution passed all 25 test cases and I coded it in around 20 minutes.

ROUND-2 : F2F

This round was scheduled on 20th Dec, 2021.

• I was asked to introduce myself.
• The interviewer gave me a scenario based question to which I suggested that Queue can be used. He was satisfied with the answer but as a follow-up he changed the scenario and I suggested that Priority Queue should and he was happy with that. He asked me about functionalities of Priority Queue, time complexities and implementation (I needn't to code that)
• The interviewer gave me another problem based on scenario for which he asked just what should be the class structure for it. It was pretty easy thing to figure out and I told him the class structure. He said that let's say there could be multiple objects of this class and to compare whether they're equal or not by the name (a string data member) would be time-consuming. I suggested that we can have some numbers assigned to each name (kind of IDs) and then use the numbers instead of comparing strings. He seemed satisfied.

The interview was actually supposed to be for 1 hour but he said he's done in only 20 minutes.

RESULT

I got an email on 3rd Jan, 2022 that I'm rejected.

MY THOUGHTS

• The recruiter insisted me (when I was first called before online round) to tell my current in-hand salary and what is my expected one. I don't like this kind of unprofessional behavior.
• In F2F round, the interviewer looked convinced with my answers and actually I knew that those answers were correct and optimal. I still couldn't understand what is the reason of rejection.