I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Capital One in Jun 2021
Interview
Process (~3 weeks):
1) Cold contacted from recruiter
2) HackerRank: Online assessment
3) Power Day: 4 hours of back-to-back 1 hr block virtual interviews. 1 - Coding, 1 - System Design, 1 - Behavioral, 1 - Business Case Study/Coding
Experience:
- Very disjointed, unorganized scheduling.
-- Example: Not given the proper links to interview until minutes beforehand. Had to re-do a block weeks later due to another initial scheduling error.
- Interviewers all nice but questions/expectations were vague and answering process mismanaged.
-- Example 1: Interviewer asked systems design question but did know how to use HackerRank tool for assessing answer. Expected candidate to know how to use "white-boarding" tool seen for the first time, and produce design diagrams in 45 min, but did not specify any details on their expectations, besides overall vague "design" question.
-- Example 2: Interviewer did not know how to access HackerRank for a coding pair and expected candidate to solve technical access problems. This significantly cut into coding time. When finally accessed, question was presented unclearly, and interviewer rushed through problem solving process, due to access issues earlier.
- Overall professionalism was lacking.
-- Example 3: After meeting with 7 different people for 6 hours overall, received automated "application" rejection. No feedback, no follow-up. Not even provided with emails to thank interviewers for their time. Obviously, to be expected for big companies in 2021, but still not professional.
Surprisingly manageable — the interview felt more like a conversation than an interrogation. It began with a sequence of coding questions, including one on merging overlapping intervals. The real challenge came during system design, where I had to outline a URL shortener service that could scale impressively. Interestingly, I had just looked at a similar architecture on PracHub, which helped me articulate my thoughts clearly. The technical questions wrapped up with validating a binary search tree, and I ended with a positive vibe. I received an offer, but ultimately chose to decline it.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Merge overlapping intervals from a list of time ranges
Interviewed for an engineer position, the interview was a joke. Asked basic OOP question with a few follow ups - no system design portion. Interviewer was very laid back and chill, didn't take it to seriously.
Was not too difficult. three total interviews all on the same day back to back. technical one, behavioral one and a case which was more of just a debugging question