Shortlisted by HR after applying to opening from Glassdoor.
Currently working as a Software Engineer at a service based company in India.
I am looking for product based companies now as I am now decent in coding and have gained knowledge of core cs concepts.
Total Experience = 3.5 years.
Previously worked at Big4 as a backend engineer for 3 years.

First Round:-

Online Coding Assessment
1 Question:-
Leetcode Medium Level Question Based on Stack and Greedy Approach. 1 Hour time. It was told that this was to filter non programmers.

Second Round:-

HR Discussion
Basic behavioural questions.
Salary Discussion.
Range Decided = 10 - 15k AED per month.

Third Round:-

Technical Interview
The interview was a pure problem solving interview where interviewer directly stated that we would not discuss anything else. The interview was decided to be of 2 hours 30 mins.

First Question:-

Leetcode Medium Level Question based on Matrix. The question was on an easy side but the edge cases on coordinates and new coding environment took me a little longer than the designated time. I took 40 mins. Also the interviewer asked me to write a bruteforce approach but still started to comment on small optimizations in my code after I solved it. All optimizations were obvious and could have been given by me if given chance to speak.

Second Question:-
This was a story based question.
It had two parts.
It was based on Strings and Hashmap.
First part was completed by me in almost 20 mins as it was just implementation based. The interviewer gave his own input format which was a non standard input so I had to use some try catch logic to input it in my IDE.
The Second part of the question was more focussed on optimization of the first part. I was not able to optimize it and after 40 mins into the second part the interviewer admitted that I won't be able to come up with it as I was using a nested dict in my part 1 approach instead of a 2 letter key approach which makes it intuitive for seeing the optimization.

He ended the interview just after this by telling me that we cannot continue further as he has given me a major hint and it was supposed to be an elimination question(which was not made clear at any point). He said that as I was able to solve 2 questions so I could try again after their cooldown period.

Time Left in the interview :- 1 hours 30 min

There was a third question which was supposed to be a System Design question. As the interviewer dropped after the second part of the second question so was not able to know what the question was.

Feedback Received = None as he dropped without giving one.

My Feedback = From the starting of the interview it looked like the interviewer was slightly unprofessional. He was 1 year junior to me so he was amused by that also. He came late and took 5-10 mins break to find the second question on internet still the interview ended with me having 1hour 30min remaining. Nevertheless it was quite fun for me to give a coding round after so much time.

After 2 weeks I received the rejection email from the HR that I was not having the skills needed for the role so they would not be continuing with my application.