InsideView Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

So, this was by far the worst interview experience I've ever had. It was totally uncoordinated and disorganized. They made me wait about 45 minutes before the first person I met was the interviewer. The interview itself lasted about an hour and 15 minutes. The interviewer wasn't even paying attention to my answers during the icebreaker, just cutting me off after a couple of sentences. Then we got into the technical stuff. He asked pretty average questions, like reversing a stack, copying a linked list with a random pointer, a basic example of the decorator pattern, and the thread-safe singleton pattern. The worst part came after the interview. I was asked to wait in the reception area, which is just a big hall with meeting rooms – not a separate space at all. It has everything in it: waiting area, workstations, restrooms, reception. I waited there for about an hour and a half. Everyone went to lunch, and I was just sitting in this mostly empty hall. After an hour, I contacted the recruiter who set up the interview, but the person she named was out of the office. I got another contact from the security guard, the only person I could see. That person was also at lunch. When they finally got back after about 1.5 hours, the guard pointed out the HR person to me. The HR person was completely surprised to see me, apparently not even knowing I was there for an interview. I explained the situation, and she came back a few minutes later saying, 'This is the only round we can do today because most of the interviewers are absent.' Seriously? They wasted about 4 hours of my time, made me wait while I was starving, conducted only one interview, and now they expect me to come back for more rounds. I don't know about their work culture, but their interview process definitely needs a lot of improvement.

So I'm not from around here, like, not from where Inside View is located. Before they called me in for an interview, there were like 3 phone rounds. The first one was all about Math, you know, stuff like Progressions, Permutations, and Combinations, plus some algorithms. The second phone round was about JAVA/J2EE tech – think Spring, Hibernate, Core JAVA, Threading, Collections, and Garbage Collection. The third phone round covered both JAVA and Algorithms. Seriously, you should check out howtodoinjava and Geeksforgeeks to nail this part. After that, I had my F2F interviews, but not right away, like almost two weeks later. The 4th round, which was F2F, focused on Threads, HashMap, and a question about Permutation of Numbers. Round 5 was with a Senior Member, mostly about my project work, digging deep into it, plus basic SQL and JAVA garbage collection. Finally, the 6th round was with HR, asking about salary and if I had any other offers.

There were 2 technical rounds, then a managerial round, and finally an HR round. They were patient and respectful, even helping me solve problems. Each round was about 45-50 minutes. If you know Java, DS & Algo, you're in. :)