Exasol Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

First, there was a coding challenge where you had to generate values that produce sha hashes with 9 leading zeros. If that went well, the next step was a meeting with the Exasol India manager to go over what to expect from the upcoming tests. Then came a proctored coding test, which was based on your experience level, so definitely practice leetcode. After that, there was an HR manager coding test, which was pretty similar to the previous one. Then, you had an interview with the team manager to chat about the company and your expectations, and maybe they threw in some technical questions too. Following that was the team interview, which was all about seeing if you'd be a good fit for the team. Lastly, there was an HR interview, mainly to discuss the offer letter and expectations.

We started with an offline coding challenge in C++ covering things like multithreading and synchronization. Then there was an online quiz on C++ versions 11, 14, 17, and 20. After that, we did some DSA questions, focusing on strings, arrays, and sorting algorithms. A technical interview followed, which varied based on the specific role. Next was a managerial interview, then a team meeting, and finally an HR round.

After the HR review, I got a take-home task to do over two weeks. It was kind of hard but interesting, took me about 5 days. What really bugged me was the live coding and technical questions session with two engineers that followed. They didn't even look at my take-home submission. The interviewers weren't very chatty, and with my interview stress, it was a tense situation. Most questions were okay difficulty-wise, but I couldn't answer most. It's weird to ask for a 500+ line coding task, have the candidate nail it, and then ask simple questions. It feels like they're trying to trick you, and not in a good way. Why not just make those simple questions the first round instead of making me spend 5 days on a task just to dismiss me based on a few silly questions in an unfriendly setting, without even checking my work from round 1?