Role - Backend Developer
Location - Hyderabad
Experience - 3 years 3 months

Round 1: Bar Raiser Round (by Interview Vector) - 90 minutes

1. Project Discussion
2. DSA question - Check if any permutation of str1 exists as a substring in str2
3. LLD: Design an E-commerce app and its warehouse inventory management- Requirements specification, design of DB Schema and all APIs
   Verdict - Strong Positive

Round 2: DSA Round

1. Max robber dp question
2. Several intervals are given, find the minimum intervals to be removed so that the remaining intervals are non-overlapping. Follow up questions were asked
   Verdict - Strong Positive

Unfortunately, the HR faced some medical emergency and was away for 1-2 months. My final round could be held only when she came back.

Round 3 - LLD - Nov 2025

1. In-depth project discussion and follow up questions
2. LLD question - Design a web crawler to fetch jobs and job data from the career page of kotak, how will you scale and optimize your design?

• I started with requirements specification and analysis. However, the interviewer kept on interrupting me again and again and hardly allowed me to speak. He was too rude and it appeared like he is showering his knowledge and looking down upon me.
• All of a sudden, the LLD question changed into a machine coding question and he asked me to also code the entire crawler in the remaining time, (in less than 30 minutes.. lol).
• I still tried my best to write the basic code structure of a web crawler. When 60 minutes were over, he started blabbering about the functionalities and optimizations which I wasn't able to include in my code (even though I had stated them in the requirements mentioned earlier).
• He then prompted that there is an error in my code. I politely told that there isn't any such case. But he was adamant and after explaining me what error was there for 10 minutes, he realized that I was correct.

Verdict - Negative. I received rejection mail immediately due to poor feedback in the last round.

• The reasons mentioned were weird, such as my coding skills were poor, I couldn't handle edge cases, exceptions etc. (lol I had used try-catch in my code extensively).
• I explained to the HR that the interviewer was himself not clear with what kind of round it was and it's practically impossible to code so many features of a crawler in just 30 minutes. But she refused to listen to anything.
• It felt like they just needed an excuse to reject me. Luck wasn't at all on my side. Hope no one faces such a silly interviewer.