My interview journey at Trackier for the Senior Backend Developer position, based in Noida, concluded with a rejection after two rounds. I have 2 years of experience, with 1 year specifically as a Golang Developer.

Round - 1 (25th May - 1 hour)

This round was initially scheduled for 45 minutes but extended to an hour. The email mentioned it would cover technical questions and coding on platforms like LeetCode/Hackerrank. However, the interviewer primarily focused on backend questions related to my current projects and work experience. He was very friendly and conversed in Hindi. He asked me to turn on my video camera and posed questions such as:

• Differences between Golang and other languages.
• The working mechanism of Goroutines.
• My contributions to my current projects.
• To write SQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB queries. I mentioned I hadn't worked with MongoDB, but he insisted, encouraging me to use Google to demonstrate my problem-solving ability for unfamiliar tasks.
• To write production-ready Golang code for a palindrome checker, which I completed with minor syntactical errors.

Overall, this round felt like a general discussion between two developers of similar experience. We spent about 10 minutes chatting about their work, culture, and tech stack, which closely matched mine. I felt very confident after this round.

I received a call on May 28th, confirming my selection for Round 2. I informed them I wouldn't be available until May 31st due to a vacation, though I was back on the 29th. I used this extra time to revise system design topics.

Round - 2 (1st June - 30 minutes)

This round was explicitly stated to be a system design round in the email, with preparatory videos like "Tiny URL shortener" and "Instagram design" by Gaurav Sen also shared. I felt a bit uneasy when the interviewer didn't ask me to turn on my video camera.

He immediately asked for my introduction, then proceeded with rapid-fire questions on topics like Redis, ElasticSearch (related to my current tech stack), the advantages of Linux over Windows, and five Linux commands. He was in such a hurry that he would move to the next question if I paused even for two seconds. After just 12 minutes, he abruptly said we could wrap up. Confused and frustrated, I interrupted him and reminded him that I was expecting a system design question as per the email.

Upon my persistence, he asked me to open draw.io and presented a very unusual question:

"A user uploads a video, and you are given 3 processes (P1, P2, P3). The output of one process goes to the input of the next. We have to make sure that these should not fail in any scenario and ultimately give us a transformed video."

Initially, I was bewildered, but I gradually clarified my doubts, asking about the nature of the "transformations." I proposed using a message queue between processes to handle failures, allowing for retries. He then questioned what would happen if P1's processing rate was greater than P2's. I suggested using a cache memory to buffer P1's output before feeding it into P2, pushing from the cache when P2 could accept more input. His only reply was, "Okay, the time for the interview is up, we can wrap up now." He offered no acknowledgment or suggestions regarding my approach.

The next day, I received a rejection email. This was the worst interview experience I've had, especially given the stark contrast between the two rounds. I suspect the position might have already been filled, and they should have communicated that beforehand, as it makes interviewees feel incompetent. I still feel frustrated and regret extending my date for the second round.