I am bit annoyed/frustrated with the way my interview loop went. Thought to share my experience.

My phone screen happened back in Fall 2022 where I was asked a binary tree related question. The interview went well after which my onsite was on the follow up. The recruiter mentioned that they have pausing hiring and will reach out anytime for onsite within a year.

I almost gave up from them once the layoffs season hit the peak. They reached out to me for onsite mid January, after which I decided to prepare a bit and then went for onsite.

For the interview questions, I will not provide the exact questions that were asked but I will provide similar questions

Algorithms & Data Structures
Interview 1. Question was similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/course-schedule-ii/description/

Experience: I thought I did well with the interview. I was able to explain my solution time complexity. I wrote the solution to the problem as well. I had a bit of brain fart while implementing solution where for one edge case I implemented incorrectly while my explanation was correct in terms of initial approach. It was an edge case in my opinion and I didnt catch it unfortunately until I got the hints. Overall in the hindsight if they are expecting to complete 100% bugfree code in interview then I didnt raise the bar as I missed one edge case.

Feedback I received: interview went well. code readability was little questioned and needed debugging hints was called out

Depth in Specialization
Interview 2: It was one of the BST related question where you will have to iterate through all the nodes.

Experience: This is IMO, interviewer lowered the bar for me (and I think the feeling might be mutual which came in the feedback). First interviewer tried to explain the problem, I had a challenging time understanding him as they were not explaining we. I said to let me read the question, I will explain what is the expectation and if we agree I will propose solution. Interviewer mentioned to me, implement the solution using Stacks (non recursive) this solution was I able to complete quickly and it passed all the results. Now the follow up was to implement in O(1) space complexity. This is was stumped me. I do believe that I was on right track that tree needs to be modifed and in general the direction was correct. I think the interviewer was expecting me to implement the problem with morris traversal (which I read at some point didnt recall the exact implementation). IS IT CORRECT EXPECTATION FROM THE CANDIDATE TO BE QUESTIONED ON SOME TRAVERSAL IMPLEMENTATION THAT OFTEN MANY PEOPLE NOT USE? I just find these kind of questions as - either you know it or you dont. It doesnt really measure the candidate's true competency. Needless to say I couldnt solve the solution in the alloted time. I requested for multiple hints and was told that - "I am on the right track/just need to change few lines of code from existing non optimized implementation". I dont really call these as valuable hints.

Feedback I received: Loweverd the bar as couldnt come with the code for optimized solution as requested. Hints not taken well.

Behavioral + System Design
Interview question: Explain me about the complex problem/project you worked on
Experience: I mentioned about my past experience and some the complexities I faced on large scale system migration, service consolidation, creating APIs and their challenges etc. I guess I dont know what kind of experience they were expecting ... the project atleast in my company was major task. I thought I explained all the challenges but may be they were expecting to do deep dive for which I didnt have time. I might have picked wrong project to discuss may be focused on some feature/product launch instead which I did in the past. I think they were looking to discuss some of projects/features implemented at Uber scale.

Feedback I got: design discussion lacked details, complexity and scope of the work was not at the level they expecting

System Design:
Interview question: Question on standard chat communication
Experience: Here, I thought the interview went well. I focused on the things I knew and read. I discussed pros and cons of different options and picked one. For any follows up questions I went to the workflow in details. The interviewer did their job and poked on some of the things they wanted to deep dive on. I was able to provide answers to that. I just felt the time was limited with lot of followups couldnt discuss everything that we discussed that are in scope for our design discussion.

Feedback I got: Good pro/con discussions, liked the scoping discussion first. API design needed to be elaborated.

Overall, honestly I am bit bummed. I guess companies like Uber have a really high bar with interview and expect the candidate to perform well in all the interviews and provide flawless code/design. Or may be thats the expectation now with so many limited openings.

I atleast appreciate the feedbacks I have recieved from them on each interview that led to them to the decision. Hopefully I can use it to improve on some of the mistakes I did. (Unlike apple who took 10 interviews in one day and ghosted me afterwards with no courtesy to provide feedback despite doing a followup).