I applied online and got response from the recruiter after 2 weeks. Then I had a generic HR related call touching the basics.
The second round was a live coding exercise. It was described previously as a technical interview, so I expected questions from the topics/tech mentioned in the job specification. And that's what I was prepared from.
But it was a coding exercise, where you were given a leet code style problem and you have to find out an algorithm having a specific Big O time complexity.
I'm old, and I graduated from university in the middle 90's. I've been working professionally since out of uni. Around 20 years. This kind of questions was something I learned in my "Data Structures and algorithms" class in the early 90's. But it doesn't mean that you shouldn't know these things, I just haven't really faced a professional problem when this kind of strict algo knowledge would be required in that low level. I worked half of my career in low latency environments in investment banking and telco. But even at those places I've never faced a situation where I had to write an algorithm with is let's say strictly O(log n), otherwise everything fails.
I can say 2 things:
1. If this is what they do on daily basis, then it's better that I failed. This is not the work I want to do. Never basically.
2. If I had known this before the interview, I would have never taken part. I don't do these leet code interviews. In my experience this is a waste of time. When I was the hiring manager and we used these tests we found brilliant minds, who weren't able to work in team, communicate with fellow engineers, and they couldn't accept other opinions. This is not good to find smart engineers, because this wasn't a real engineering problem. This was a problem for an exam on the Uni.
Som if you don't like Codility and Leetcode style problems, then do not waste the time with this company.
At the end I found out an algorithm in using 80% of the time available, but I wasn't able to code it in the remaining time. Basically, one line was missing, a simple "if" statement which would prevent going in infinite loop, but we were out of time and the interviewer didn't let me add that line. I believe, all of their test cases would work with that, but without it, nothing basically.
