Calix Staff Software Engineer interview questions

Overall a month of wastage while interviewing with Calix. had a bad experience during the overall interview process. I’m writing this interview experience so that it could improve the interview process for further conducting interviews. It started with the screening process, in the first round with HR with clear expectations and clarifications regarding the salary, job role, and my previous employment. After then I had 4 technical round of interview,, 1st round framed System design high level (the use cases is what Calix company is working on and how to scale), 2nd round 2 DSA(medium level leetcode) problems, 3rd Distributed system scaling, building the complete application like full stack, docker , kubernetes , AWS services and now comes the good part 4th round of discussion, then interviewer more interested in why you left your previous organization and why you took a month gap and why you choose freelancing instead of full time opportunity he spend 15 to 20 minutes and still unsatisfied and then actual interview starts which is technical but scenario based with expectation of scaling, consistent and fault tolerance. Interviewer himself was not clear what he was asking and after asking clarification questions by me he kept changing the question after providing multiple answers which looked unsatisfactory to him he himself started answering the same solution that I provided earlier. After he asked me to write code for a leetcode problem - need to find the length overlapping part input - “STRINGMATCH” and “MATCHBOX” with O(n) and lastly he asked system design question to assign unique ids which i explaining in multiple answer with pros and cons but unsatisfactory to interviewer. And again the good thing happened is he started to answer the same solution that I provided earlier for unique id generation. Interview scheduled for 1 hr and went till 2 and half hours. After a week I got a call from the HR and got confirmation after evaluating all the interview feedback I got selected and we can offer you this much only which was not even close to my current salary. When I asked the HR that I have clearly informed you about my expectations in the screening round then what happened now. Then answer I got you got selected for one level down what Calix expected. Summary, I feel Calix and HR should improve the way taking notes in screening rounds and should monitor the interviews and collect feedback from the interviewee’s as well so an interviewer comes prepared well to take an interview. Technical interviewers should only focus on the technical part, not HR or manager related questions.

3 technical rounds and 1 HR round. I cleared all the rounds. HR and I had a discussion about CTC and other benefits and came to an agreement. HR told me that they will release the offer letter in 2 days but they have ghosted me for 2 months without any update untill the end of my notice period. At the end, I got to know that they ran out of quarterly budget and stopped my offer. But they could have told me in the beginning and I would have looked for other companies. The total experience looked totally unprofessional.