Company: IDFC First Bank
Role: Backend Developer (3+ YOE)
Interview Type: In-Person
Experience Level: Honestly, one of the worst in-person interviews I’ve attended.

Application Process:

• Applied via: LinkedIn (I think)

• Online Test:

  • 1 DSA question (Easy-Medium)
  • 1 Machine coding question (Implement methods in a given class – Easy-Medium)

• A week later, I got an email for an in-person interview scheduled for July 19th.

Pre-Interview Experience:

I had a few questions, so I reached out to the HR. She told me:

“If you reach by 9:30 AM, your interview will start within 15 mins and the process will be done in 3-4 hours max.”

Fair enough. I showed up on time. And then the real experience began.

On-Site Experience:

Reality: ~100+ candidates were crammed into their office, waiting.

⏱️ First Round (Coding):

• Start delayed by ~30-40 mins.
• Problem: Given 5 cards in the format "3-H", find the card with the highest value.
• Simple string parsing – done in 15 mins.
• Called the invigilator, got it evaluated. Most people solved it.

Then we were sent to a different floor for the next round. That’s where things went south.

Disaster Begins:

They collected hard copies of our resumes. Around 8–10 interviewers were picking up resumes at random and interviewing candidates. That would’ve been fine—except there were 100+ people and two panelist took one candidate at a time.

I finished Round 1 by 11:00 AM, and waited around 5–6 hours for my next round. My 2nd round finally happened around 4:30 PM.

Technical Round 1 (T1):

1. Binary Search Problem:

   • Find first occurrence of 1 in a sorted array of 0s and 1s.
   • I used standard BS; then was asked to solve it in 1 iteration.
   • I suggested checking the left after finding 1. Interviewer seemed satisfied, even though this could degrade to O(n) in worst case (all 1s).
   • I didn’t push further.

2. SQL Questions:

   • Write a basic JOIN query on multiple tables – done.
   • Then a GROUP BY query – I used a WHERE clause incorrectly. Interviewer pointed that out. (My bad – I wasn’t prepared for SQL questions.)

3. Design Pattern Question:

   • Asked for a design pattern for a scenario that didn’t map to any real pattern. I gave a custom solution inspired by the Observer Pattern. He nodded.

4. AWS/ECS/Fargate Confusion:

   • I mentioned using ECS with Fargate in a project.
   • He asked: “Why use Fargate and not ECS?”
   • 🤯 Tried to explain Fargate is part of ECS, used for serverless infra, no EC2 mgmt, etc. (P.S - I have cleared associate solution architect certificate by aws)
   • He repeated the question.
   • what i had in mind dude- “if a women is preganant she could have a boy(let's say it farget) or girl (called it EC2) they both will be inside her in any case, you cannot direct get a boy or girl you need women (ECS) for that.It’s like asking why have a boy and not a woman — Fargate and EC2 are launch types inside ECS”

5. I asked how many rounds were left.

   "2 more technical + 1 managerial + 1 CTO"

Seriously? HR told me the whole thing would be wrapped up in 3–4 hours. How is this level of miscommunication even acceptable?

Final Verdict:

Right after my round ended, the interviewer walked out and informed HR. A minute later, HR told me I was rejected.

All I said was: “Okay.”
No regrets. It was a complete waste of time and energy.
Panelists were unprepared, disorganized, and asked random, unfocused questions.

Final Thoughts:

• The HR team didn’t manage the process well.
• The interviewers lacked clarity and structure.
• The overall experience felt like a chaotic cattle call.

Not worth the time or potential. Move on.