Summary
Had a bad interview experience at ZScalar for the Senior Staff Engineer role. Faced a challenging DSA problem, but my solution was correct except for a string matching error. The interviewer was rude and the process lacked professionalism.
Full Experience
I recently had the opportunity to interview for the ZScalar Sr Staff Engineer position, but the experience was quite negative. They asked me a DSA hard LeetCode problem, which I was able to solve logically but failed due to a string matching mistake. I explained the time and space complexity, which was correct. However, the interviewer was very rude and the process lacked proper setup, like not turning on the camera. The outcome was a strong no hire, which felt unfair given my 13 years of experience and the interviewer's own 7 years of experience.
Interview Questions (1)
Given a beginWord, endWord, and a dictionary wordList, find the length of the shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord. For example, with beginWord = "hit", endWord = "cog", and wordList = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log","cog"], the output is 5.