My first round was a technical phone screen with a TL.
They said it was technical, but since my experience and the role (low level/embedding) weren't a great match, they spent a lot of time deep-diving into my resume.
On top of that, my big-tech infra project architecture was fairly simple, and I had to explain some of the tools I'd used, so before I knew it, 50 minutes were gone.
The coding question was a random LeetCode-style problem, and on top of that I had to return the actual substring — it was a bit too easy, and I'd completely forgotten I'd already done this problem before.
What I wrote wasn't the most concise solution, but I verified afterward that it was correct — just a couple of extra lines and one variable that could have been dropped.
I did spend some effort explaining my code though. The interviewer had a bit of trouble following since my logic wasn't quite the most elegant solution, and the way I explained it probably wasn't the clearest either — something I could improve on.
At the end they asked two rote C pointer questions. I hadn't written C/C++ in so long that I mixed up "array of int pointers" and "pointer to array of int," which was kind of funny. I still remembered things like *(ptr+3) though — all pretty basic stuff.
Result unknown at the time, just recording this for now.
Update (2026-07-28): Got rejected. They said the main issue was my background wasn't a strong enough match, but my skills weren't a problem. If another role opens up, I could continue with them.
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