Applied through linkedin, got an email from recruiter for initial chat. Recruiter was quite quick in responding and was very 'Human' like... In my recent experience of talking with recruiters, I have faced 'Bot' kind of people like - tell me on a rating from 1 to 5 how skilled I am in a particular skill and will continue asking such questions, IMO this dosen't make sense. Anyways...

1. Recruiter - 15 min
   Explain about past projects and Technologies worked on - Resume based
   Why Fortinet?
   Why leaving current Role?
   Recruiter was Quick and clear with the expectations from the role and what they were looking for. Explained next steps well.

2. Hiring Manager - Resume Based- 30 min
   Gave a brief about product, shared some links to go through to know more about the product
   Asked about projects worked on in current role in detail, Was very keen to know in detail and was humble and well mannered

3. Hacker rank test
   4 questions - 60 mins

   • 1. Ansible related task - Easy
   • 2. Docker related task - Easy
   • 3. Jenkins MCQ - Easy
   • 4. Easy Hackerrank question - Similar to https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/989768/Amazon-or-OA-2020-or-Transaction-logs

4. Virtual Onsite Interview

• 1. Hiring Manager - Technical - 45 min
     a. https://leetcode.com/problems/first-unique-character-in-a-string/
     b. Given a table 'people' with columns - First Name
     Last Name
     Address
     Zip
     Provide top 10 zip codes with most population
     select count(first_name) , zip from people group by zip order by count(first_name) desc limit 10;
     c. Ansible task to copy multiple files from one path to another
     d. Asked about how to debug an issue in the application? (generic)

• 2. Senior Software Engineer - Technical - 45 min

     Started without exchanging any greetings, seemed in a hurry. Told me to write code for finding 2nd most frequently occurring number from an array of numbers.
     I was quick to write a function for finding kth frequent number. -- https://leetcode.com/problems/top-k-frequent-elements/

     Moved to next question - Merge 2 UNsorted linkedist - came down to discussing merge sort of a list, unfortunately I wasn't able to provide a pseudo code for it even after successfully telling the approach.

     For the third question , Interviewer was quite confused and was unable to provide clear instructions and requirements, was not prepared at all.
     I tried my best to decipher what he wanted:
     Write a shell script to print details like available memory, number of processes, cpu utilization etc.
     I told him about the commands we could use and mentioned that we can print it via echo. But he wasn't satisfied with this, only he knows what he wanted

• 3. Principal Software Engineer- Technical - 45 min

     This interviewer was also not prepared on what questions to ask, but eventually came up with a question was was quite clear about expectations, wasted a lot of time in writing the input for the question.
     Given a dictionary, and and keys to mask,
     Return a dictionary with masked values for the given keys according to length of values .
     Initially asked for naive solution- (which I provided very quickly), then changed the example with nested dict and asked to implement recursion - unfortunately time ran out for me to proceed with the recursion solution.

• 4. Principal Software Engineer - Technical - 45 min
     Very reasonable, humble and well mannerd interviewer. Started with introducing himself first which no one else did. Asked about my introduction and why I am looking to switch.

     Then started with a plethora of genral interview questions around the role, like:

  • How DNS is served ? e.g. when you hit enter after typing google.com in browser
  • What happens in background?
  • What do you mean by CI - CD, why is that required?
  • What is containerization? What are docker containers? What is kubernetes?
  • What is OOPS?
  • What are design patterns?
  • What is pep8 library in python?
  • What is the difference between languages like python and java?
  • How do scopes in python work?
  • What is self keyword in python?
  • What is protected scope in python?
  • How would you go about setting up a git repository? Where to place the gitignore files, readme file etc.
• 5. VP of Product - Resume Based - 30 min
     Mostly resume and experience based , behavioral nothing much to talk about.

There were no breaks in between the interviews for virtual onsite, streched for a span of 4.5 hours (I did ask for a 2 min break after the 3rd interview). Some of the interviewers were very boastful about there position in the company and lacked humility, showed even more attitude when I asked them questions like - What would you like to change in the current team/ process? Which showcased how their behaviour would be in team environment.