Timeline - May 2026
YOE (then) : 8.5+ Years
Current (Most Recent Company) : SMTS(IC3) at Oracle (Laid off in September 2025)
College - IITK

Applied through referral, Recruiter reached out to me for a Lead Engineer (Vice President Software Enginnering) role and here's the experience -

R1 (DSA Coding) :-
Given a contact which contains phone number and name attached to it, write a method which takes a list of old contacts, compares them to a list of new contacts and keeps only the contacts which are unique and exists in the new lista dn return them. A contact is unique if any of name and number is not matching with the other contact.

• Was able to do this easily in my IntelliJ and show it. The interview basically wanted to chek if I am hands on with coding and also asked me to use Java8+ stream filter collect apis etc to see if I can write them. The logic was pretty simple and nothing compared to what we do in those Leetcode mediums and hards.
• Just brush up basic Java stuff like overiding @Equals and @Hashcode methods in a class for object equals comparison and similar normal java stuff.
• The interviewer gave the feedback right away and told that he would ask the next interviewer to probe me around system design.

R2(System Design) :- The lady was 20 years experienced and herself Lead Engineer and didn't even introduce herself. Took 5 minutes in loading my resume from somewhere and then went through it. And then.... "Let's start with a coding question"... LOL

• Kind of asked the similar question like first round and also expected me to expose it as a REST endpoint and expectation was to hit it from POSTMAN or something..... I completed the logic but had some setup errors in my intelliJ which came all of a sudden while running the tests... Time was running so she said let's leave it and asked me is it Okay if I ask you questions related to cassandra as One of my previous projects was on cassandra.
• Then instead of asking me to design a system she started asking these rapid fire kind of questions like

1. What is replication factor?
2. What is Partion key and Clustering key in cassandra?
3. How do you tune consistency in cassandra?

Answered eevrything and she kept nodding and noting. Didn't even probe or cross question anything, I am sure she didn't know much and had some ChatGPT questionnaire opened on her screen - "Top-5 Cassandra related questions". It felt like more of a BTech 2nd year Viva than a professional Lead Software Enginner System Design Interview for a top MNC where the interviewer herself was 20 years experienced.

I am yet to receive the feedbnack of this round. I am sure she may reject me but I have certainly REJECTED THE INTERVIEWER.

Final Verdict :- REJECTED (Not sure about me, but the interviewer is). I already got a Staff SDE offer from a Market Leading Cloud Security Company just before the second round here, hence just gave it casually for the sake of it. But the experience was terrible for sure. Not to foget she took the interview right from her desk and i could see people roaming in background and doing random stuff. And she was turning off her video most of the times again and again. It feels wierd talking to the screen. At least should have gone to some meeting room. Some of these so called Interviewers need to be TRAINED.