I recently appeared for interview round 1 for MTS-3 at Nutanix . Will summarize the process and my experience.
The round's focus area - team fitment , problem solving/coding
The interview began with exchange of introduction.
The interviewer (10 yrs exp, MTS-4) then specified that we will spend 10 minutes on your past work and then move onto 2 DSA problems, if time permits.
I summarized my work on the previous org , then moved onto 2 DSA standard questions.
- Minimum cost of connecting ropes (Standard heap problem)
- Given a matrix containing 0s, and 1s, find the shortest distance between any 2 - 1s (I did this using multisource bfs)
After a week's time, I got a verdict that the interviewer gave a "mild yes", and sadly, I got rejected without any further rounds. The recruiter said, while the algorithmic ability was rated good, the low level design aspect wasn't good , as the interviewer mentioned , from your previous experience. And at Nutanix, we take design skills very seriously.
My Experience:
I have a total of ~4 years of experience. To summarize anything within 10 minutes and to convince the interviewer within that time frame that I am good at something, is not very likely. Plus I honestly believe 10 minutes isn't the right amount of time to assess anything. The interviewer didn't even ask any probing questions, and having worked at a startup, I believe I have good experience to talk about, if I had time. I thought 10 minutes would barely be enough to scratch the surface and my major focus was on the remaining time to complete the DSA questions.
DSA questions were softballs, the first one took less than 10 minutes that too because I was stressing on the code quality. The second one took slightly more time, I got a bit stuck but still multisource BFS is the solution I believe and the interviewer also seemed convinced and said he has fair idea about what I was trying to do.
The interviewer didn't seem very professional, he switched off his camera couple of times, went out for doing some trivial work during the 50 minute interview, didn't quite feel right.
Overall, it was a bit shocking to not get a "good yes" , I thought the interview went really well. And also, not taking a second feedback(another round) for a "mild yes" scenario felt too stringent.
I can't pinpoint any learnings as such, but maybe for folks interviewing at Nutanix, try to get more technical in the initial part, they take it pretty seriously as a measure of your Low level design skills :/
