The whole process took about 4 months, but I guess could be squeezed into 2 months.
Applied for P6 (Principal) role. 8 Years of experience.
Had 6 rounds after initial HR call:
Coding interviews, 2 rounds 45 minutes each, 15 minutes break in between :
They pay close attention for code quality, tests, and how you describe thinking process and alternatives to your solution.
Interviews on this stage are super nice - they allow you to use your IDE, to emulate your everyday work - deep respect from me here.
First round
- Implement a rate limiter - implemented leaking bucket algorithm (day before watched this and implemented exactly the same algorithm)
- Modify it to be per user - added concurrent hashmap and pasted previous code for each bucket
- Add a credit system for each user in case rate was not used - happened to be so my code was easily adjustable for it
- Some discussions on thread safety, JVM and on how to make it distributed
Outcome - Strong Hire P6
Second round
- Sort collection
Outcome - Strong Hire P6
System design, 1 hour
Design a web crawler - I did a few mistakes and forgot about loops ln obtained links, quickly fixed design after interviewer mentioned it.
If you want p6 here there is no room for errors or hesitation, everything will be used against you.
In general I find judging super biased and unrealistic.
Outcome - Hire P5 <- biggest failure
Craft interview, 1 hour
In depth discussion about my project architecture, problems, trade offs and responsibilities. Since I did recently have company wide impact I didn't have any issues with this stage
Outcome - Strong Hire P6
Management interview, 1 hour
Standard behavioural discussion with hiring mananager - achievements, trade offs, handling conflicts, etc.
Outcome - In between Hire and Strong Hire P6
Values interview, 30 minutes
A bit less in depth behavioral - can literally copy answers from management interview
Although I had strong hire for everything apart from system design they didn't give me p6, they asked me to redo sys dis.
Second System design, 1 hour
Design a tagging system for Atlassian products - was fully confident here, but interviewer was super tedious about API so I wasted big chunk of time there, in the end design ended up pretty hectic.
Outcome - Hire P5
In the end I got low balled to P5 - I guess that's their general practice to pay people less.
TC - 190k AUD base, 15% annual bonus, RSU 250k USD for 4 years
Rejected - primarily because of recent reviews on Blind/Glassdoor.
