Lab49 Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I did two tech interviews at Lab49. The first one was pretty standard and went fine, with some general questions about data structures and a coding challenge similar to LeetCode. The interviewer was engaged and responsive. The second round, however, was way different. I got a codebase that was only partly done and had to use multithreading to implement an interface. After I got the task, the interviewer just seemed to check out and started doing other things. I had to ask my clarifying questions over and over to get his attention, and even then, he took a while to get back into it before answering. At one point, he even gave me wrong info, which I only figured out later when I was coding. All in all, the lack of focus and professionalism in that second round felt really disrespectful and left a bad taste.

So, the interview process was quite a ride. It started with a hard technical MCQ test, then a bug fixing and code refactoring round which was pretty easy and got positive feedback the same day. Next up was a system design and coding round where I had to build a URL shortener using Flask, which was moderate difficulty and the interviewer was cool. Then, another Python technical round with a senior interviewer, lots of theoretical questions, the interviewer seemed a bit off but still got positive feedback. After that, a techno-managerial round called stakeholder evaluation was supposed to happen, but the manager was busy and it got cancelled. It was never rescheduled, and HR said the position was filled internally. Then, like 2-3 months later, they reached out again saying the interview would resume. HR wanted to restart discussions, booked a slot, but again didn't show up. After a few days, HR apologized again and asked some repetitive questions about work experience. Finally, they asked to take a psychometric test. They mentioned the remaining rounds would be in early September, but after the psychometric test, nothing happened. It was a total waste of my time, dragging on for months and killing 4-5 hours of mine.

I saw an ad online and a recruiter reached out. We chatted about my career goals and some general stuff, then he did a quick 20 min phone screen with some Java questions. That went okay, so he set up a 1-hour technical phone interview with two engineers where they grilled me on Java specifics like concurrency and garbage collection, no coding though. They liked my answers, so I went in for a 2.5-hour face-to-face with a senior engineer and a manager. I had to do a whiteboard coding problem and talk about my past projects. Then, a recruiter and HR person chatted with me for the last 30 mins.