I've been job hunting recently, and an HR person from my old company reached out to me and set up an interview. It started with 2 rounds, BQ + coding. I didn't really want to go back to a former employer, but I figured I'd use it as practice, so I took it. Overall the experience was the same familiar flavor — mainly just terrible.
The first round was BQ with an interviewer who'd been there a good while, but right off the bat he had me design an AI chatbot. I hadn't prepared AI or system design at all — I was purely there to practice BQ and coding — so I gritted my teeth and winged a high-level design: access management for internal users, storing user info and context, and ideally being able to audit it for compliance checks. Then we moved on to my resume projects and BQ. By the end it actually went okay.
The second round was coding, LRU cache. The scheduling email told me to set up my own environment locally to run code, but the interviewer wouldn't allow that — I had to write it in a text note instead. Writing Python indentation in a text note was maddening, and when I shared my screen, the leftmost part wasn't even visible. The interviewer said he'd send the question in the chat, then told me chat wasn't working so he'd just say it out loud — so other than "LRU" he told me basically nothing. I kept trying to clarify with him; just the input/output format alone I asked about 6 times and got nowhere. I kept trying to ask whether he wanted the cache to store key-value pairs, or whether he wanted me to hash out a key for him — he wouldn't answer for the longest time. I explained my approach and the data structure and why it's O(1), and he acted like he didn't understand and kept pushing me to just implement it first. After I wrote the doubly linked list + dict, he then got stuck for a while on what exactly should be stored in the dict versus in the linked list. Who cares what I store — as long as I can find the corresponding object, and it runs, it's correct. It was like he could only understand it if it matched his own answer exactly. When we discussed the capacity of the LRU cache, I specifically clarified that capacity can only be O(1) if it's counted by number of objects — if it's counted by each object's actual size, you might need to scan and evict one by one, making it O(n). I wanted to clarify this with him and he wouldn't listen, and he had no reaction when I explained it. In the end he just hung up, without even a polite sign-off.
Terrible interview experience. Right after the interview I wrote to HR to complain. I know it probably won't do anything, but I was just angry at having to deal with someone so dense. Unsurprisingly, I got rejected.
Same industry, banking, but J.P. Morgan's interviews are always disorganized, with no standards or consistency. Can't they learn a thing or two from Goldman next door?
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