Attentive Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Onsite Rounds and an Unexpected Catalog Design

I was contacted and invited to an onsite. Round 1 combined coding and system design. Round 2 included coding, system design, and behavioral questions. I felt that my system design and behavioral performance in Round 2 was poor, and I was ultimately rejected.

There were not many interview reports about this company, so I summarized everything I could find. All the questions I received turned out to be questions that had appeared before. There were not many of them, and they were not actually difficult. It was still a shame to miss this opportunity.

For me, the Round 1 coding question was the Lisp Expression Parser. The Round 2 coding question was the mouse problem. The Round 1 system design question was probably the one about pulling data from a third party. Round 2 was the classic catalog service problem.

I had expected the catalog service problem to appear in Round 1, so when it did not, I stopped preparing it. When it came up in Round 2 instead, I was suddenly caught off guard. What a pity.