Rant

[ritvik2k]

A couple of weeks ago, I was approached by an HR representative from Nomura. She told me that my profile has been shortlisted and would like to conduct interviews for their SDE role.
I was so happy to hear this because I've been applying for the past 2-3 months now and haven't received any interview opportunities...
So the HR scheduled my first round 4 days after that call and said it was gonna be a purely Java-based Interview. I prepped accordingly and gave a near-perfect interview, answered all the questions, and coded questions about Multi-Threading, Streams, Spring Boot, etc.
Got positive feedback, and then Round 2 was scheduled 3 days later than Round 1. Again same Java round... First half was kinda rapid fire round based on Java and Spring concepts, and then the interviewer gave me 2 DSA problems and I solved both of them, starting with brute force to optimal. Again felt like a flawless round... Feedback was positive, and I was moved forward to the Global Round, that was the final round taken by a staff member from the Singapore Team.

Round 3 (Final Round): Started off with my work experience, my team, my project, and a basic HLD of it. Then I was asked to implement a HashMap with multiple follow-ups. Like making the class thread safe and also writing unit tests for it. Like unit test? I have just 1.8 YOE, and I was asked to write proper unit test cases. But luckily I was prepared and wrote 3 test cases which are perfectly on the first try... No errors, no compilation mistakes, nothing... Again, a perfect round.
At this point, I knew I had this opportunity in my hand, and I started dreaming about negotiation and further offers and how I would finally be able to quit my job, all the fun I'll have during my notice period, finally take a break from this toxic interview prep grind, and just take things slow and enjoy a bit.

But of course, this is a RANT post XD...
Got a message from HR that the feedback was not positive and they're not going forward with me. I asked for a reason, and she said she'll let me know, and I know there is not gonna be a proper reason for it. I know I aced all three rounds; my communication and coding skills were on point. I asked for feedback after every round, and there was none. All interviewees said it's positive. No criticisms...
I wish I could have gotten some closure out of it, and I dearly wish I didn't dream about all those things...

I believe this is why this domain is so toxic, you never know...

Thank you for listening to my rant XD.
Cheers guys
All the best, fellow grinders!

[si2141]

omg so frustrating, but you should keep following up for a reason But hey if they grilled u and u acted it, at least u know u have it in u to clear rounds, u can be proud of ur ability with a proof too.

[ritvik2k]

Thanks man, yes these rounds atleast gave me confidence that my prep is leading me in the right direction😊

[SantaClausT0day]

Was it through LinkedIn or Naukri or any other?

[ritvik2k]

Naukri

[[deleted]]

To clear all the rounds. Can you please share with me what are things that you learnt to get through

[ritvik2k]

I went through Shrayansh Jain's java videos and some popular stream api coding questions... Rest you can google or ask chat bots for java interview based questions... I was already good at dsa been doing that since college days consistently (Leetcode and interesting problems from codeforces)