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It started with a technical round, and if I did well, there were four more. I ended up doing all five rounds. I answered everything about technical concepts and system design. The last round with a senior manager was a complete waste of time; they were rude and asked irrelevant personal questions. I got rejected because they said my experience and tech expertise were better suited for a senior applications engineer role. It felt like a waste of time after going through five rounds.

I applied via LinkedIn on Feb 13. The recruiter screening went well. Then, I had the first technical interview round. After that, it was a total of 1+4 rounds. The 4 rounds included behavioral questions mixed with architecture and whiteboard tasks. The first round focused on Microservices, SpringBoot, coding syntax, and basic Java. The second round involved designing an architecture for a given scenario and some basic Java questions at the end. The third round was a mix of Microservices and behavioral questions. The fourth round was on the whiteboard, where I had to design an architecture for a scenario, answer questions about it, and write some basic overview code. The fifth round consisted of behavioral questions. Rounds 4 and 5 were on the same day with a 1-hour gap in between. I'm not sure why I was rejected, as I felt I performed well.

I was contacted by a recruiter who set up 3 interviews. The first was technical, and the second and third were described as "behavioral" but were also technical. There wasn't any coding except for one impromptu question in the last interview. The questions asked in all the interviews were pretty much the same. Overall, the experience was really bad. The first interviewer was late and uninterested from the start, rushed the interview, and was unhappy with every answer, correcting me constantly even on open-ended questions like describing Object-Oriented programming. The second interviewer was also very late and rushed, finishing early, though they were nice and just apologized for being late. They barely asked any questions. The third interview was similar to the first but worse. The interviewers weren't paying attention, were working or chatting with others on Teams, and scoffed and rolled their eyes every time I spoke, offering corrections in a scolding manner. For example, when asked about converting from React to Angular, after I explained the context and reasons, they dismissed it and implied I didn't understand. They ended the interview with about 10 minutes left by giving me a quick impromptu function to write a unit test for, seemingly doubting my knowledge. My takeaway is to prepare for every interview as if it's technical and to consider leaving if interviewers are rude.