Currently: SSE, 41 LPA fixed.
Expected: SDE 2, 42 LPA fixed.

I applied on the company website and received a callback. The recruiter was slightly rude and had a lot of questions to ask about the things I have worked on. Nevertheless, she told me that there will be 5 rounds:

• Assessment (1 hour expected)
• LLD
• HLD
• Hiring Manager
• HR

In the middle of the week she asked me to submit the assessment within 24 hours, I obliged.

Round 1 (Assessment):

• 10 MCQs: The MCQs were a mix of JS related questions and framework questions. One thing which was horrible was that the MCQs had questions for EVERY framework: Svelte, Vue, Astro but nothing on React, their own tech stack? Had a horrible time with those, I just marked whatever seemed most plausible to me.
• Modern JS questions like usage of structuredClone to replace deep cloning.
• A game: The 2nd part was a weird drag and drop based game which had 7 levels, to be completed within 7 minutes. It was like a character who can go on a fixed path and can lose the round if goes on a tile with a hazar, you need to skip that and move it to the end and win the round by giving it directions to move, creating separate packages with movement to call (like creating functions to call). Never seen this before, but easy enough.
• 2 DSA questions: Both easy level, one was based on stack, the other was string manipulation.
• 2 more questions: JS related questions, but quite easy.

Overall the assessment took more than 1 hour, but nevermind, I was moved to the LLD round the same day.

Round 2 (LLD):

This is where things went downhill. The interviewer was insanely rude, did no intro and was not interested in answering any of my questions that I had mid questions. He was not open to clarifying requriements, doubts or what was he looking for in the answers. One big issue that I felt, the interviewer had memorised answers and was not open to any other approach (even as minor as writing a for loop in a different way).

There were 7-8 rapid fire questions, all to be written down as perfectly functioning code, no discussions, no fundamentals check.

• CSS: Create 3 divs inside a parent div and give them 40 : 30 : 30 space. Follow ups were, adding a gap between them and not allowing them to leave the divs.
• CSS: Create 9 divs inside a parent div, remove their classnames and have them filled with alternate colors and take equal space inside the parent div. Got a bit confused here to think through, but the interviewer wanted to instantly move on to the next question. I still ended up finishing in a few seconds after that.
• JS: Create a promise which logs something after 3 seconds. I created one, with a console.log inside setTimeout in the promise, but interviewer as usualy, failed to clarify initially that he wanted me to log from outside the promise and onyl resolve inside the setTimeout. The guy was insanely rude about it, like I am a mind reader or something. I asked for a final clarification and all he replied with was "hmm".
• JS: Explain was debounce and throttle is and create a useDebounce hook. No issues here, I gave a straight textbook answer and he was satisfied.
• JS: What is deep clone? How can we do it? Create a polyfill. I answered with the JSON.stringify method and a structuredClone and proceeded to work on the polyfill. I had no idea of this question, haven't practised deep clone in a while so I proceeded to take what I thought was the best direction and took some time to think (and I was thinking in the right direction!). The guy asked if I was stuck somewhere and I told him that I was thinking to handle arrays separately and objects separately. He didn't answer, or confirm, or say anything. He arrogantly just asked me to code first and think later. I wrote the code, it was messy since I did not remember the textbook answer and was doing it on the fly. He pointed some mistakes out which I agreed with and fixed, and pointed out an edge case which I fixed. Something he was fixated on was, why was I using a normal for loop and not for...in for objects instead of Object.keys. I did not have an answer since I usually just write that way due to solving a lot of DSA in JS, but he was visibly offended by it, like he only wanted that 1 answer. Horrible experience with this question despite me giving a fully accurate approach and answering correctly.
• React: Given a search box and a list of people, the search box is calling an API on every character, apply debounce. Since I had already used useDebounce hook, he forbid the usage of that and wanted me to create a debounce function. I created one and used correct, the whole logic was correct but it wasn't working. The interviewer did not chime in, despite me telling him the direction of my thinking and what I have completed, he just said, you can let it be and if I have any questions for him (5 minutes were remaining btw). Apparently in the time pressure I had forgotten to use a useMemo which I figured out right after the interview.

But the guy was honestly offended by even basic questions so even if I had done that, I am sure despite my answers he would not have let me clear the round, he wasn't in the mood for that. Of course, I got a rejection email.

I have given 20+ interviews in the past 4 months, just so that I can practise interviewing, both startups and medium-big tech. This was the worst exeprience I have ever had. It gave me a feeling that Hiver has been hyping itself up with great social media jargon to attract people but the people are shallow, egoistic and are not open to other opinions or questions.

I am glad I could judge the company this early, I would not want to work in a place with people like this.