My interview process at Jumbotail for an SDE-1 (Backend developer) position for freshers consisted of three planned rounds: DSA + Behavioural (virtual), DSA + Behavioural (onsite), and an HR round. I only completed the first virtual round.

Round 1: DSA + Behavioural

The first round began with a discussion about my resume, focusing on my projects and the technologies I used. Since I had mentioned a hackathon, the interviewer inquired about my role and the tech stack I utilized to implement features.

Following this, I was presented with one DSA question, which I managed to solve and explain with code within approximately 10 minutes. The question was to detect a cycle in a linked list, returning true if detected and false otherwise, along with proper functions and driver code. I implemented the solution using the Hare and Tortoise algorithm.

After solving, I was asked to paste my code into an online IDE. While doing so, I accidentally deleted the class name, which caused an error. At the time, I couldn't figure out why my correctly implemented algorithm was failing. The interviewer pointed out the missing class name. After resetting the IDE and pasting my code again without deleting anything, it ran successfully. I then handled three test cases provided by the interviewer.

The round concluded with questions on OOPS concepts, specifically polymorphism and its various types.

The day after, I received feedback from HR stating that I was rejected. The reason provided was that my debugging skills were not up to their expectations. This experience taught me a valuable lesson: even if theoretical concepts and problem-solving skills are strong, a lack of debugging proficiency can lead to rejection. I only asked for one hint during the entire interview when I couldn't understand the error, and it ultimately cost me the opportunity.