VMware | SMTS | 8.5 yoe | Interview Experience [Rejected]

I started my journey by applying for the SMTS position at VMware through LinkedIn. Within a week, I received a mail from HR, signaling the start of a rather extensive interview process that lasted over a month.

My first hurdle was an Online Assessment on HackerRank, which consisted of two coding questions (rated easy/medium), one SQL query problem, and a medium-difficulty multithreading question.

Next, I had a Virtual Round where I tackled two medium-level coding problems on a shared HackerRank IDE. The first was to find a triplet in an array that sums to a given value, and the second involved converting a linked list into a complete binary tree. I executed both problems with the test cases provided by the interviewer.

The third Virtual Round was quite comprehensive. It started with a multithreading problem where I was asked to implement a countdown latch. Following that, there was a Low-Level Design (LLD) discussion for a Snake and Ladder game. I had to implement a method to initialize the game board, considering custom board sizes, user-defined numbers of snakes and ladders, and ensuring all snakes and ladders had unique start and end points, among other specific conditions.

A significant part of the process was the two-hour High-Level Design discussion in the fourth Virtual Round. The scenario involved designing a system to consume message files from an external source. These compressed files, ranging from 1-50 MB uncompressed, needed to be processed and passed to a downstream system. The challenge was to handle billions of such messages per hour with limited hardware, all while accounting for potential downstream latencies. I felt this discussion went well, and the interviewer seemed satisfied.

The fifth Virtual Round included another coding question, which was a classic 'Merge Intervals' problem. This was followed by an LLD discussion on a batch processing system, similar to a cron job. This round also felt positive.

Finally, I reached the sixth Virtual Round with the Hiring Manager. This was primarily a verbal discussion where I talked about my current projects and their architecture. The conversation then shifted to security implementations for a system. I presented my approach, but it seemed the interviewer was looking for something very specific that I hadn't memorized or deeply explored, which unfortunately played a crucial role in the outcome.

After such a long and involved interview journey, taking over a month, it was tough to digest the rejection, especially when everything had seemingly gone so well up until that last specific question.