Hey everyone, this is going to be a bit of a long post, but I promise it's worth sticking through. I recently had an interview experience with CloudSEK that was quite strange and unexpected. From unstructured questions to irrelevant topics, it was unlike anything I’ve encountered before. So, bear with me as I share the details of what turned out to be a rather chaotic interview.

Introduction

had the opportunity to interview with CloudSek a few months back for a Software Engineer role aimed at freshers (0+ years of experience). For context, I’m a 2023 graduate, currently working as an SDE - Infrastructure at a product-based company.

I received a call from HR, who mentioned that they found my profile interesting and thought I could be a great fit. After a 20-minute phone screening, she scheduled my first technical round for two days later, advising me to focus on my previous work experience, basics, DSA, and system design. I had technical round with an SDE-2. That round went well, and I passed.

However, this is where things started going downhill.

Technical Round 2 - The Chaos Begins

This second technical round was supposed to focus on my work experience, DSA, core CS concepts (as per HR’s instructions). But, surprise! The interviewer was a Security Engineer. He joined the meeting 15 minutes late and didn’t even bother asking for an introduction or my name, which felt kinda off behaviour to me.

These are some of the questions which he asked (other than few more irrelevant questions):

Q: "What do you know about APIs, any practical experience?"

I told him that while I hadn’t directly worked on implementing APIs, I understood the concepts well. Without acknowledging that, he immediately asked me to open a code editor. I thought he was going to ask a DSA problem, but instead, he gave me this:

Q: "You are given a list of URLs. You need to make requests to these URLs, retrieve the metadata, and store it in a JSON file. Also, how can you make the process faster?"

I was baffled. This wasn’t a typical DSA question but more of a use-case-specific problem involving consuming APIs and parsing data. I politely told him I could discuss the approach and maybe write pseudocode since it seemed like an open-ended problem.

His response:
"But you said you know the basics of APIs." (in a humiliating tone)

I was not even completed explaining my approach, he without paying much attention, quickly diverted the conversation to the topics: multithreading, concurrency, and asynchronous I/O. He kept asking questions on asynchronous I/O, which I hadn’t worked on. He wanted me to code instances of async I/O.

No matter what I said, his reactions were flat, and the interview vibe was already off.

Q: "Let’s say you have 2 million records, and the read is slow. What would you do to improve it?"

I explained how I would implement indexing on the relevant column to optimize read operations. Instead of acknowledging my answer, he pushed further:

Q: "Let’s say you have two indexed columns, A and B, and a compound index on A+B. From where would the fetching be faster?"

This was the first time I had heard the term compound indexing (Even my friend who's an SDE-3 at PBC had no idea about this term). Despite that, I answered his questions about indexing confidently.

The interviewer wasn’t done yet. He then asked:

Q: "Where exactly is the index created? Could you show diagrammatically where an index resides in a DB?"

Fortunately, I was able to answer these questions about indexing well. But just when I thought the interview was moving in a somewhat reasonable direction, he threw in another unexpected question.

Q: "What do you know about GO? Talk to me about the low level working of GO"?

I was honest and told him that I hadn’t worked with GO but was planning to explore and learn more about it. Despite me saying that—and the fact that neither my resume nor the job description mentioned GO—he immediately gave me a GO-related problem.

I did my best to discuss the question by relating concepts to Python and C++, which I had experience with.

Next came yet another irrelevant question:

Q: "You have different sharded machines (machine A, B, C, etc.) with sharded DBs, and you're unable to retrieve data from machine B. What would you do to ensure data is retrievable from machine B?"

At this point, I started wondering if this was an interview for a senior role rather than a fresher software engineering position. Nonetheless, I explained how I would troubleshoot the issue, but again, his reaction was neutral.

Toward the end of the interview, he threw in a random question about Kubernetes, which felt more like a checkbox exercise rather than a genuine assessment of my knowledge. He didn't even ask, "Do you have any questions for me?" and ended by saying, "HR will reach out to you."

Conclusion
The interview lasted for 1 hour and 30 minutes. Throughout, I did my best to answer all the questions and actively participate in the discussions. However, I was constantly bombarded with questions that I had never worked on, had no experience with, and that were irrelevant to the role. Twice, I was even taunted with, "What have you worked on then?" To make things worse, nothing was asked from my resume. I quickly realized that apart from 1 or 2 relevant discussions around Kubernetes, Docker, and Networking the rest of the conversation felt completely off-track. Despite this, I stayed engaged, hoping for some relevant questions to come up.

Reflecting on the experience, it felt like I was being interviewed for an experienced position rather than a fresher role. At one point, the interviewer even mentioned a couple of technologies that weren’t on my resume, which made me wonder: Did he have someone else’s resume? (The thought crossed my mind.)

Later, I received a call from HR, who seemed surprised (she mentioned she was expecting good feedback) that I didn’t pass the round. I explained everything to her, and she assured me that it was strange and that she would get back to me with updates (the typical HR response). Since then, I’ve been waiting for updates… but nothing. Perhaps they realized something went wrong but never wanted to admit it.

I still have a few questions on my mind when I think about it: If the position was for an SDE, why did a Security Engineer conduct my interview? Even if he did, why did he ask questions that were not only irrelevant to the role but also seemed a bit advanced? Is joining an interview late acceptable? Is extending the interview overtime (for 90 minutes) considered fine? Do they really not care about the experience of the person being interviewed?