👨‍💻 Background

• College: Tier 2
• Graduation Year: 2023
• Experience: 2 years in software development
• Current Company: Société Générale
• Tech Stack: Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, SQL, Unix, etc.

📅 Interview Timeline

• Applied Via: Referral
• Response Time: 2 days
• Recruiter Call: Informed about face-to-face rounds at Manyata Tech Park (No Online Assessment)
• Total Rounds: 4
• Technical Round 1
• Technical Round 2
• Hiring Manager Round
• Technical Round 3 (Virtual)

🔍 Round 1: Technical Interview 1

• Format: Coding + Resume-based (Scenario-based)
• Duration: 1.5 hrs
• Interviewers: 2 (but one drove 95% of the round)
• Topics Covered:
• DSA: Tower of Hanoi, Kth largest from stream
• Microservices, REST API, Java, Spring Boot, React
• SQL: Two simple queries
• Java Stream API
• Difficulty: Moderate
• 📝 Thoughts: Answered most questions confidently. Positive start.

💡 Round 2: Low-Level Design

• Format: Whiteboard System Design + Resume discussion
• Duration: 1 hr
• Interviewer: Senior Engineer
• Topics:
• Design Uber-like Ride Booking Service
• Deep dive into current application at work
• Difficulty: Moderate
• 📝 Thoughts: Interview went well, felt like I impressed them.

💬 Round 3: Hiring Manager Interview

• Format: STAR-based managerial + tech conversation
• Duration: 20 mins
• Interviewers: 2 (One shadowing, one active HM)
• Topics Covered:
• Microservices, DBMS, Java, Spring Boot
• Behavioral:
• How do you stay motivated?
• What are you learning currently?
• Difficulty: Hard (Very in-depth, some unfamiliar concepts)
• 📝 Thoughts: Managed about 70–80% well. Room for improvement in depth.

💬 Round 4: Technical Interview (Virtual)

• Format: Coding + Scenario-based questions
• Duration: 1 hr
• Interviewer: Lead Engineer
• Topics Covered:
• DSA: Three Sum, Union of sorted arrays
• Java Streams, REST APIs, Multithreading
• Design an API: Fetch external data, check DB existence
• Debugging multithreading scenarios
• Difficulty: Moderate
• 📝 Thoughts: Strong performance, but stumbled discussing a feature built by a teammate that I included on my resume.

❓ Common Interview Questions I Was Asked

• “Difference between partitioning and sharding”
• “Drawbacks of NoSQL”
• “Purpose of @Valid in Spring”
• “Java 8 features in detail”
• “Scaling app from 100 to 1M users”
• “Drawbacks of microservices”
• “Microservice transaction rollback strategies”
• “Mockito internals”
• “@Service vs @Controller – impact?”
• “@Bean vs @Component”
• “SQL queries using joins, LIKE, GROUP BY”
• “Current application architecture”
• “Service discovery concepts”
• “Motivation at work”
• “Ride Booking Service HLD/LLD”
• “Circuit breaker pattern”
• “Decorator, Factory, Proxy patterns”
• “Optimizing database queries”
• “Normalization forms (DBMS)”

🎯 Offer & Reflections

• Outcome: Rejected
• Lesson Learned: Never list a resume feature you can't explain in-depth
• Final Thoughts:
• Extremely positive experience overall
• Interviewers and recruiter were genuinely respectful and supportive
• Left the process more confident and self-aware