Experience: 5.5 yoe
Education: NIT
Past Experience: Product Based MNCs (Including one of MAANG)

Round 1: Machine Coding

Develop a Task Management System that allows users to manage their daily tasks. The system should enabled users to create, delete, update, view tasks, subtasks and stories within a project. Each task, subtask (tasks can have multiple subtasks) and a story(can have multiple tasks) can have a description, deadline, and assigned user.

Mandatory Functionality:

• Registration and login: Users can register and login to the system.
• Task Management:

1. Create new tasks with a description and deadline.
2. View a list of tasks assigned to the logged-in user.
3. Update tasks, including changing the description, deadline and status.
4. Delete tasks.
5. Allow tasks, subtasks and stories to be moved across the project hierarchy, including their dependent items.

• Get the current workload of a user: No of tasks in different states like assigned, pending, etc.

Offline assignement at a designated time.

Time given: 3 Hours.

Followup discussion: 30-45 Mins :
Walkthrough of the code, improvements that can be done, code should be able to run the stated scenarios, questions around scaling, which design patterns were used.

Round 2: System design (HLD+LLD)

Discussion Board

Features

• Boards and Management
  • Any User can create a board
  • Users can subscribe to any number of boards and follow any number of users.
  • User and create a discussion in a board that one is subscribed to.
  • Admin can block any number of users and can revoke the same at any time.
    • Block types:
      • Temporary (VIEW, UPDATE, CREATE)
      • Permanent (VIEW, UPDATE, CREATE)
  • Activities on a discussion:
    • Upvote, Downvote
    • Comments (Can be nested comments and Upvotes/Downvotes per comment are also allowed)
  • Need to show summary view of any post, say number of view, comments, upvotes, downvotes and so on.
  • Feed for the user:
    • Basis on the boards he/she subscribed to and user he/she follows:
      • Sort by popularity (most activity in last X day)
      • Sort by highest (highest activity of all time)

Spent most of the time in HLD discussion, couldnt time it properly and hence LLD aspects couldnt be covered a lot.

Major questions regarding scalability, How to handle Viral Posts, DB design, Which microservices will be created.

Verdict: Rejected