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Summary
I applied for an SDE-1(Backend) role at Xarterian with 1 year of experience. I went through a telephonic round and two technical rounds covering DSA, system design, and theoretical questions. Ultimately, I was rejected because I did not meet their minimum 2 years of experience requirement, despite performing well in the interviews.
Full Experience
Applied through hirist/LinkedIn (since opening was posted on both).
After initial resume screening, HR reached out to me for scheduling further rounds.
Total experience - 1 year
Telephonic round
After intro, discussion started with my current tech stack,how would i rate myself out of 10 in Nodejs,Javascript, DSA...current company, currect CTC...exp CTC...reason for switch...Notice period..availability of further rounds
Round-1
After introduction,Interviewer started with theoratical ques...
1-Promises vs async/await
2-Event loop in Nodejs(libuv)
3-Features of Nodejs
4-why v8 engine is used for Nodejs
5-What is callback hell,how can be avoid it
6-what is temporal dead zone
7-setInterval vs setTimeout, which will be executed first in event loop
Few questions on basic system design...
what is scaling, sharding, load balancing, rate limiting...
DSA questions-
1-https://leetcode.com/problems/unique-paths/description/
After giving dry run and explaining my approach, interviewer asked me to code on IDE
after completing the code and executing given test cases,
Follow up-1:
https://leetcode.com/problems/unique-paths-ii/
completed this as well, same as above
Follow-up: 2
Now he told me that movement is allowed in all 8 directions and there is obstacle as well at various positions in grid...
Told him my dfs approach with dry run on various test cases..interviewer was satisfied ..but since time was running up he asked me not to code the solution
Round-2
After intro, interviewer asked...
1- http1 vs http2....why http2 was introduced...what are its advantages
2-long polling vs short polling
3-Promises and its states
4-mysql vs mongodb
5-database replication
after this, he gave me 2 MongoDB ques ....i completed both and gave explanation of everything that i was writing
DSA ques-
https://leetcode.com/problems/count-complete-subarrays-in-an-array/description/?envType=daily-question&envId=2025-04-24
after discussing my brute force approach , he asked me to code ...i was given to code on google docs...after i finished the code
he asked me to further optimize the code ...explained him my sliding window approach and later i showed him how my code will work by dry running 3-4 test cases given by him...
After this i coded the solution.
At the end, interviewer praised me regarding my answers on theoratical part as well as my problem solving approach...
HR's response
After waiting for one week ,i reached out to HR regarding my selection or rejection.....She told me that since i was having 1 year of full time experience, i was rejected ...they were looking for a minm of 2 YOE candidate.....i dont get that if i am solving all the questions then why there is such criteria...and if there was this 2 yoe criteria ..then why did they scheduled my interviews even after telling them everything in telephonic round itself....
Request from Seniors
Please tell me how to get more oppurtunities, I have been applying daily on Linkedin, naukri, wellfound, hirist, instahyre....but even after applying everywhere ,i am getting very few calls...and even after calls almost neglegible interviews are scheduled....
Thanks in advance for any help.
Interview Questions (17)
Explain the differences between Promises and async/await.
Explain the Event loop in Node.js, mentioning libuv.
Discuss the key features of Node.js.
Explain why the V8 engine is used for Node.js.
What is callback hell and how can it be avoided?
Explain what the temporal dead zone is in JavaScript.
Compare setInterval and setTimeout, and discuss which will be executed first in the event loop.
Explain scaling, sharding, load balancing, and rate limiting in system design.
A robot is located at the top-left corner of a m x n grid (marked 'Start' in the diagram below). The robot can only move either down or right at any point in time. The robot is trying to reach the bottom-right corner of the grid (marked 'Finish' in the diagram below). How many possible unique paths are there?
A robot is located at the top-left corner of a m x n grid (marked 'Start' in the diagram below). The robot can only move either down or right at any point in time. The robot is trying to reach the bottom-right corner of the grid (marked 'Finish' in the diagram below). Now consider if some obstacles are added to the grids. How many unique paths would there be? An obstacle and space is marked as 1 or 0 respectively in the grid.
Given a grid with obstacles, find the number of unique paths from a start to an end point, where movement is allowed in all 8 directions (horizontally, vertically, and diagonally). There are obstacles at various positions in the grid.
Compare HTTP/1 and HTTP/2, discussing why HTTP/2 was introduced and its advantages.
Explain the differences between long polling and short polling.
Describe JavaScript Promises and their different states.
Compare MySQL and MongoDB, highlighting their differences and use cases.
Explain database replication.