Interview preparation can sometimes feel disconnected from reality. We solve hundreds of LeetCode problems, read system design articles and practice behavioural questions—but what actually gets asked in interviews? I recently came across this detailed interview journey covering multiple companies over the last six months. The candidate has 7 years of experience and was interviewing for Senior Software Engineer roles. What makes these experiences particularly useful is the variety: DSA, Low-Level Design, High-Level Design, Java and Spring Boot, operating systems, networking, behavioural discussions and even questions related to recent AI technologies. One clear takeaway from all these interviews is this: you don't need to know everything, but you need to understand the fundamentals deeply enough to have a real conversation about them. Here is a cleaner breakdown of the journey. Experience Profile...

I've been going back and forth on this for weeks and I finally just want to put it out there because I know I'm not the only one stuck on this. I'm in my 3rd year. Coursework, DSA prep and trying to build something real on the side all at once. And honestly? The market right now does not feel like what seniors were describing even two years ago. You open one internship posting and it already has a few thousand applicants before you've even finished reading the JD. ATS filters feel tighter. OAs feel more filtered too, like companies are actively trying to cut the pool down before a human ever looks at your resume. So naturally, I've been splitting my time two ways and I don't think I'm doing either one particularly well because of it. Side one: DSA. Sliding windows, 2D array traversal, trees, graphs the usual grind. You know the drill. Some days it feels productive, some days I solve three problems and immediately forget the pattern the next morning. Side two: full-stack projects. Actually building something end-to-end. Something that isn't just a to-do app clone, something that could pass as "production-ready" if someone actually looked under the hood. ...

Sharing an interesting Online Assessment question from Adobe's recent hackathon. This one isn't a typical LeetCode-style problem it's framed around a logistics/data-compression scenario, but underneath it's a clean sliding window problem once you break down what's actually being asked. Company: Adobe Assessment Type: Hackathon Online Assessment (OA) Topic: Arrays, Sliding Window, Bit Manipulation Logic Difficulty Level: Medium-Hard Problem Statement In a logistics and supply chain management system, quantities of goods are recorded at various checkpoints and stored in an array of size n....

Recently, I appeared for Quince's on-campus hiring process for the SDE-1 role. The process had two stages: an Online Assessment followed by a technical interview round. I couldn't find much recent information on Quince's interview pattern online, so I'm sharing my experience here in detail to help others preparing for it. Overall, the difficulty was on the higher side for an SDE-1 process. Both the OA and the interview round leaned toward hard-level problems rather than the usual easy-to-medium mix you'd expect at this stage. Company: Quince Role: Software Development Engineer 1 (SDE-1) Hiring Type: On-Campus Interview Rounds: Online Assessment (OA) + Technical Interview Difficulty Level: Hard...

A few weeks ago, I interviewed with OnePay for a Senior Software Engineer (Backend) role. Unfortunately, I didn't make it past the System Design round, but I still wanted to share my experience because I think it'll help others prepare with the right expectations. Every interview teaches you something, whether you get the offer or not. In this case, the biggest lesson wasn't about system design itself it was about how important it is for both the interviewer and candidate to be aligned on what a round is actually meant to evaluate. Here's how my experience went. Interview Overview Company: OnePay Role: Senior Software Engineer (Backend)...

Recently, I appeared for the Round 2 interview for the SDE II position at WheelsEye. Unlike a typical coding interview, this round was centered around Low-Level Design (LLD) and High-Level Design (HLD), with the focus on designing a real-world backend system. The interviewer presented a practical engineering scenario rather than asking abstract design questions, which made the discussion quite interesting. Interview Problem The interviewer asked me to design a system for generating and sending daily API health metrics to internal stakeholders. As an example, they shared a service named UserService with APIs such as: ...

Lat week, I appeared for the Round 1 interview for the Senior Software Engineer position at Paytm and I wanted to share my experience to help others preparing for similar technical interviews. The interview primarily focused on Data Structures & Algorithms and Java fundamentals, followed by a discussion on database transactions and concurrency concepts. Overall, the round lasted around 45–60 minutes and was a balanced mix of coding and backend fundamentals. Interview Overview Company: Paytm Role: Senior Software Engineer Round: Technical Round 1 Duration: Approximately 45–60 minutes...

Recently, I appeared for the PhonePe Off-Campus Online Assessment for the 2027 Graduate Hiring Program and I wanted to share my experience to help others preparing for upcoming hiring rounds. One thing that stood out immediately was that the camera remained ON throughout the assessment for remote proctoring, so taking screenshots or capturing the problem statement wasn't possible. The coding question also followed a Codeforces-style problem statement, meaning it was presented as a story-based problem rather than a direct algorithmic question. This required spending a few extra minutes carefully understanding the actual constraints and objective before jumping into coding. Assessment Overview Company: PhonePe Hiring: Off-Campus 2027 Graduate Program Mode: Online Assessment Proctoring: Camera ON throughout the test...

Interview Process I recently participated in the interview process for the Software Development Engineer II (SDE-2) role at Flipkart. The entire process was spread across nearly a month and consisted of four stages, covering coding, machine coding, design and implementation discussions. | Field | Details | |--------|---------| | Company | Flipkart | | Role | Software Development Engineer II (SDE-2) | | Experience | 3 Years | | Location | Bengaluru |...

Interview Process I recently went through the interview process for the Software Development Engineer 3 (SDE 3) role at eBay. The overall process was well organized and covered multiple areas, including coding, system design, project discussions and behavioral evaluation. The interviewers were professional and gave enough time to explain my thought process throughout the process. | Field | Details | |--------|---------| | Company | eBay | | Role | Software Development Engineer 3 (SDE 3) | | Location | Bengaluru | | Interview Mode | Online + On-site |...

| Field | Details | |--------|---------| | Company | Arcesium | | Role | Staff Software Engineer | | Location | Hyderabad | | Interview Mode | Virtual | | Interview Process | Ongoing | I recently interviewed for the Staff Software Engineer position at Arcesium. The hiring process started with an online assessment followed by virtual technical interview rounds. The interview focused on problem-solving skills, practical coding and discussions around previous work experience. ...

I recently interviewed with QRT (Quadeye) for a Software Engineer – Data Platform role in Mumbai. The opportunity began when a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn regarding a Data Engineer position. Since I was more interested in software engineering, I declined the original role, and the recruiter suggested interviewing for the Software Engineer position instead. The interview process consisted of four rounds, covering coding, low-level design, and high-level system design. Overall, the interviews focused heavily on software engineering fundamentals, design patterns, performance optimization, and distributed systems rather than only algorithmic problem solving. Interview Overview | Company | QRT (Quadeye) | | -------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------- | | Role | Software Engineer – Data Platform (Quantitative Technologist) | | Location | Mumbai |...

I recently interviewed for the SDE-3 position at Tesco. The interview process consisted of two technical rounds, with one round focused on Low-Level Design (LLD) and coding, followed by a High-Level Design (HLD) interview. One notable aspect of the process was the scheduling. After completing the first round on a Monday, the second interview was postponed four times before finally taking place on the Friday of the following week. Here's a detailed breakdown of my experience. Interview Overview | Company | Tesco | | -------------- | ---------------------------------------- |...

Cisco recently conducted its Technical Intern 2027 On-Campus Online Assessment (OA) for students through campus placements. The assessment was well-balanced, evaluating candidates on Computer Science fundamentals, problem-solving ability and implementation skills under a strict time limit. In this thread, I'll share the assessment pattern, the coding questions that were asked, the approaches to solve them and some preparation tips for future candidates. Assessment Overview | Company | Cisco | | -------------------- | ----------------------- | | Role | Technical Intern (2027) |...

Uber recently conducted its 2027 Summer Software Engineering Internship Online Assessment (OA) for campus hiring. The assessment consisted of three coding questions to be solved within a 65-minute time limit. The problems primarily tested data structures, graph traversal, tree algorithms, and simulation skills. Here's a detailed breakdown of the questions and the overall experience. Assessment Overview | Company | Uber | | ------------------- | ----------------------------------------- | | Role | Software Engineering Intern (Summer 2027) | | Hiring Mode | Campus Recruitment |...

Landing a Google L4 Software Engineer interview is a significant milestone for experienced software engineers. Recently, I completed the complete interview process for the Google L4 (US) role. The process consisted of a phone screen, a Googliness interview, two onsite technical coding rounds, and finally the team-matching stage. In this article, I'll share the interview structure, the types of questions I encountered, and my overall experience. Interview Overview | Company | Google | | ---------------- | ---------------------------------- | | Role | Software Engineer L4 |...

The Telescoping Constructor Anti-Pattern occurs when a class has multiple constructors with different combinations of parameters to support optional fields. As the number of optional parameters grows, the number of constructors increases, making the class difficult to read, maintain and use correctly. Example Suppose you have a Car class. public class Car { public string Brand { get; } public string Model { get; }...

The interview began with a brief self-introduction, where I talked about my professional background, current role and the projects I have worked on. The interviewer then focused on my technical experience. Since I had mentioned working with both Memcached and Redis, the interviewer asked me to compare the two. The discussion covered their architecture, use cases, performance characteristics, persistence, data structures and scenarios where one would be preferred over the other. After the technical discussion, the interviewer moved on to a Data ...

NET / C# Fundamentals Can you explain the SOLID principles in object-oriented design? What is Dependency Injection (DI) in C# and why is it important? What are the different service lifetimes in ASP.NET Core (Singleton, Scoped and Transient)? What is middleware in ASP.NET Core and how does the middleware pipeline work? Angular How would you optimize the performance of an Angular application? Entity Framework How can you optimize Entity Framework queries for better performance? What are the differences between the Code-First and Database-First approaches in Entity Framework?...

You are given: A string s consisting of uppercase English letters. An integer k. You are allowed to change at most k characters in the string. During each operation, you can replace any character with any other uppercase English letter. Your goal is to return the length of the longest substring that can be ...

Given two strings s1 and s2, return true if any permutation (anagram) of s1 exists as a substring of s2. Otherwise, return false. A permutation means rearranging all the characters of a string without adding or removing any character. Example 1 Input: s1 = "ab" s2 = "eidbaooo" ...

As part of the interview process for the Tech Lead – Full Stack position at 021 Trade, I was asked to design a highly scalable, low-latency automated trading system capable of executing trades based on user-defined strategies. The assignment focuses on system design, architecture, scalability, reliability, communication protocols, and handling real-world trading scenarios rather than implementation details. Senior Backend Engineer Assignment Context Stocky is a hypothetical stock brokerage startup working on NSE and BSE. ...

Arcesium is widely regarded as one of the most challenging product-company interviews in India. Unlike many companies that focus exclusively on Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA), Arcesium evaluates candidates across multiple dimensions: Problem Solving DSA Low-Level Design Machine Coding Backend Engineering System Design Computer Science Fundamentals ...

KLA is one of the most underrated product companies for software engineers. While companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon receive most of the attention, KLA builds software that powers semiconductor inspection and manufacturing systems used across the chip industry. As a result, KLA interviews emphasize: Strong computer science fundamentals Problem-solving ability Software design skills Engineering depth Debugging mindset ...

Tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot can generate code, fix bugs, and even explain complex concepts instantly. While they boost speed, some argue they reduce deep learning and problem-solving ability. 👉 Let’s discuss: Do you feel more productive or less confident without AI? Where should we draw the line?

Traditionally, cracking interviews required strong DSA skills. But today, recruiters are also looking for practical experience, GitHub portfolios and deployed projects. At the same time, big tech companies still emphasize algorithmic problem-solving. 👉 For experienced developers: What actually helped you get hired? What would you prioritize if starting again?

With the rise of tools powered by Generative AI, many entry-level coding tasks (like writing boilerplate code, debugging or documentation) are now automated. This raises an important concern are companies still hiring freshers or expecting fewer but more skilled engineers? 👉 Would love to hear from hiring managers and recent graduates: Are junior roles shrinking? ...

I am working mainly with C# (.NET) and JavaScript (React). My tasks include writing new features, fixing bugs and refactoring existing code. I need an AI model that produces the most accurate and reliable code with ...

I work mainly with .NET core (c#) in backend and React for Frontend. Which AI model is best for coding and debugging complex bugs in production-level projects?

Hi everyone, After 2.5 years of consistent effort and preparation, I’m thrilled to share that I’ve finally cracked Atlassian! 🎉 Experience: 8 years Current CTC: ~30 LPA (all fixed) Bonus Stocks: ~10L Atlassian Offer:...