Offer | Experiences Combined - Microsoft | Atlassian | Walmart | Zscaler | Uber

Anonymous User

2528

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

My 8 months of job hunt has come to an end and I will be joining Zscaler next week as a Staff Software Development Engineer. I have already shared almost all of my interview experiences, but creating this post so this post can become a one stop reference and can help all those preparing and grinding in this brutal market affected severely by layoffs and lowballing everywhere.

Attaching links to all my interview experiences at the end of this post but before that, few thoughts from my experience :

Among almost 13 companies, I passed interviews of only 4-5 i.e. Microsoft, Atlassian, Walmart, Zscaler & Okta. But the biggest shocker is that despite passing interviews with strong feedback, it didn't convert to Final Offers from BIG TECH companies like even Microsoft and Atlassian, shows how brutal the current Market is.
Never pin all your hopes on one company, apply to multiple and interview parallely if you can, you can choose the number accordingly so your interview performance doesn't get impacted by jumping here and there.
Don't relax (if impacted) or resign (if currently working) UNLESS you get an official joining date from the company. Just passing interviews and being in the team matching phase is not enough. Companies' stocks can suddenly fall and they can decide to layoff, freeze the hiring or even the positions may get filled internally even if you think you did so well in the interviews. I have first hand experience in this, that too twice.
Many companies here lowballing, they have cut their budgets for cost savings and offering even upto 10-15 lakhs less than what they used to offer 2 years back e.g. Salesforce. Some shameless companies like Walmart are not even ready to match your current compensation. They know how many are in the market and taking advantage of that.
Final advice - If you get a decent offer, Just join and don't rely on some other Big company where you're currently interviewing. You can resign after just 1 month if you get a SOLID offer from somewhere really better, but don't reject the previous offer. Having a job in hand is very very important at this time. Companies might not offer you anything despite 2 months of interview process which you PASSED, so better to have something in hand.

Below are my Interview expeirences from past 6+ months, Hope this helps those interviewing. All the very best, always happy to help. Feel free to reach out.

I also interviewed for Omnissa (Formerly VMware BU) and Rubrik but was rejected after just 1-2 rounds, hence didn't create any posts for them.

Omnissa(November 2025) - https://leetcode.com/problems/set-matrix-zeroes/description/

I explained the brute force approach as well as improved and most optimal, coded the solution as well. The interviewer seemed stupid to me and only wanted to hear what he must have seen as the solution of this question before the interview, in fact he wanted even the code to be line by line same as what he thought the standard answer LOL, they never reached out to me after that.

Rubrik(November/December 2025) - One hackerrank and Had two interview rounds. First coding round was a lengthy arse question which I Don't even remember and can't even recollect, but it was something similar to what people shared as past experiences on Leetcode.
Second round was a Concurrency and Multithreading round where a Cinema ticket booking kind of code was written already and I had to figure out the concurrency problems and fix it in that.

Both rounds went bad, Interviewers were nice though and as expected I got the email "Thank you for taking time to interview with us but....."

Comments (12)