Adobe | CS1 | Interview Experience | 4.8 Years | Rejected

I applied for a CS1 position at Adobe through an employee referral and received an interview call within two weeks. The entire process lasted about 4-5 weeks.

Round 1: Technical
This round focused on data structures and algorithms. I was asked to solve two LeetCode problems: Group Anagrams and Merge Intervals.

Round 2: Technical
Another technical round where I tackled the Median of Two Sorted Arrays problem.

Round 3: System Design
The focus here was on the Low-Level Design (LLD) of a client-side rate limiting library. The interviewer expected me to code a rate-limiting algorithm. I designed and explained a complete, thread-safe solution with a driver class demonstrating client ID-based rate limiting. We then discussed potential test cases for this code, including how to test threaded clients here, etc.

Round 4: Hiring Manager
This round started with extensive discussions about my previous work experience. The interviewer asked some quick questions on concurrency, binary semaphores, and mutexes.

Then, an open-ended question about linear search in an array was posed. I was asked to write an algorithm to search an element in an unsorted array, then modify the loop to be unbounded, and finally, address potential issues without using try/catch blocks. I explained that an unbounded loop would eventually lead to memory issues like stack overflow or integer overflow. I suggested increasing JVM memory or breaking the loop under certain conditions, but acknowledged that the linear search algorithm itself would eventually fail for some test cases. I attempted to use some things like bit manipulations or 'hacks' to control the infinite loop by decrementing the loop variable, but these weren't what the interviewer was looking for. I realized I wasn't clear on their expectations, which I believe was a turning point. Later, typical operational questions followed, such as how I handle conflict, what my manager would say about me, and how I react to not receiving credit for my work. I answered these confidently.

Verdict: Rejected!