All my Interviews after being Laid Off || Fifth Interview || Delhivery || GGN || SDE 1

Background

After being laid off with around 1 year and 4 months of experience, I found myself in a tough market, having lost touch with Data Structures and Algorithms. Despite the initial shock, I quickly shifted my focus to job hunting.

Round 2 Retake 1

This round was conducted by an Engineering Manager, who emphasized basics rather than deep DSA. We discussed DBMS terminologies and concepts; I could answer most, but struggled with the Master-Slave concept. The interviewer then reviewed my resume, asking questions related to Redis and MySQL. Surprisingly, questions also came up about Kubernetes, Kafka, RabbitMQ, and AWS SQS, none of which were on my resume. The feedback was 'Positive but not that positive,' according to the recruiter. I realized my lack of knowledge in K8s, RabbitMQ, and Kafka likely made the difference.

Round 2 Retake 2

I received another call for a retake of Round 2 for a different team, which was framed as a 30-minute technical discussion. We discussed my past experiences. I was asked: 'How would you know that there is some bug in your feature?' I explained thorough testing and using error management tools like Sentry post-release. The interviewer then reframed the question to: 'How would you know that a particular API became slow after your release?' I shared my experience with product ratings in my previous company and using New Relic dashboards. The feedback for this round was negative, and I realized later the interviewer likely wanted me to mention PagerDuty, a tool I hadn't worked with.

Round 2 Retake 3

A month later, the same recruiter contacted me for yet another opening in a different team, same location. This was an hour-long interview, with the recruiter mentioning a heavy focus on AWS and problem-solving. I discussed the architecture of a product I worked on, explaining how we utilized Adapter and Factory patterns. Then I was presented with a puzzle: '3 Bags, A, B, C - contains Salt, Sugar, and a mix of both. All having wrong labels. Find minimum number of attempts to find assign right labels.' Following this, we discussed the 'Rotate array' problem, focusing on its time and space complexity, even with inbuilt functions. The interviewer was reluctant about using a reverse inbuilt function, claiming it utilizes cache space, a point I disagreed with and couldn't find supporting evidence for online. The feedback for this round was also negative, which I had anticipated. I was disheartened, feeling I missed my last chance. I found the interviewer knowledgeable but somewhat arrogant, frequently mentioning his 13-15 years of experience compared to mine. Interestingly, no questions were asked about AWS, which I had prepared thoroughly. I was also unprepared for the puzzle.