I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Capital One
Interview
To start, I want to say that the communication with the recruiter was wonderful throughout the process. As others have stated, started with the recruiter screening, followed by a take home assessment. Then came the power day and this is where things went downhill.
Four hours straight with absolutely no breaks.
Round 1: the worst of the 4. The design portion. I had prepared extensively for my thoughts on how I would go about answering this portion only to be met with a interviewer who continuously interrupted me and explained that I hadn’t yet solved for a part of the question as I was literally explaining my solution for that part. He wanted a very specific answer and any variance was unacceptable. He was rude, and quite frankly disrespectful. I left round 1 feeling as though I no longer even wanted to work for this company.
Round 2 was marginally better by comparison. I had two interviewers who could not seem less interested in being there. They gave me the coding questions and as I solved for it they were essentially silent. One of the questions asked for an output of the index of two specific numbers, and the interviewer pointed out it was wrong until I explained it is outputting the index as the question states to do, not the numbers themself. And so he had be modify my answer to output the numbers instead.
Round 3: this round was a typical behavioral interview and I mostly enjoyed speaking to my interviewers. At this point I was positively turned off by this entire experience.
Round 4: case study. This portion was odd though not horrible. My interviewer was nice, but I don’t understand how this portion at all displays engineering abilities.
Overall I’ve experienced far more pleasant and productive interviews. If your power day involves sending out resources to cram and study for so that interviewees can pass, then there’s an issue.
I do not recommend this experience at all, and I do not hope to interview with them in the future.
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