After applying through linkedin and formally applying through their website, the HR person reached out to me via email to schedule an interview. I provided a date and scheduled the interview. The HR recruiter was a no-show on the specified date, waited for about 15 minutes for the call. Two days later I get an email stating that the number was wrong in the system. I could see on the original google meet schedule link that my number mentioned in the scheduling email and time was correct. We reschedule the call and on the date , I get the call about 5-7 minutes late. We talked about some basic screening questions and yes/no questions for Robotics theory. I was told that there will be three more rounds: HM round, technical round, and then an onsite panel round.
I managed to answer all of them. Then I get a request to schedule a HM interview call. The Hiring Manager was a pleasant person to interact with. It was akin to a system design round and questions were about perception, box detection and Perception/camera basics, RANSAC and outier rejection. It was quite fun to interact with him and my questions about the company were answered well.
While the feedback for the HM round was positive, I did not hear anything for a week. I then get an email a week later that I will be having the next technical round with a team engineer. I schedule the call and in the scheduling email it said it was for about 30 minutes with an engineer. It was contradictory to what was said in the first round. The email exclusively said Coding Round. I was expecting a leetcode style easy or medium question and some discussion. I asked followup clairfying questions about the language I should prepare for and the coding platform and got no response from the recruiter.
I prepared for a coding round, but decided to prepare for everything else a little bit anyway because of the lack of response from the recruiter.
The interview turned out to be a lot of modern c++ trivia, python code refactoring and a system design round, all jam packed in an hour. The c++ trivia questions, some of them were about modern c++ basics ( special mention for rule of 3/5/0 and cpp programming guidelines because I did not remember on the top of my head). I was then asked about compilers and compiler optimizations, which code is faster (sum or sum3 (summing 3 numbers in a vector at a time)), could have answered this question better. I was then given a rospy python node code to refactor, there were some redundancies in the code and design was not great, so I suggested those changes. I was asked to scale the code and design and this is where I believe I could have answered better. The interviewer was silently expecting a config file based answer, and I went straight for the answer (which was an offbeat answer) instead of asking followup questions. The interviewer also did not try to nudge me in the right direction if the answers I was giving were not what was expected. Then the system design round, with increasing complexity of perception questions. I did my best to answer them.
All in all I had a negative experience interviewing with this company, mainly because of the way my candidacy was handled by the recruiter.
