I applied through university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Capital One in Sept 2016
Interview
Did a HackerRank coding challenge followed by an onsite interview. The on site was a "technical" interview followed by a fit/behavioural interview. The "technical" is in quotes because they just had a senior software engineer ask me to go through my HackerRank challenge code followed by ask me a question on every single bullet point on my resume. For example, on my resume I mentioned that I'd worked with SQL 2 years prior, and she asked me to write a relatively detailed SQL query. Then she asked me to reverse a string. Literally one line into the code she interrupted me and asked me another question regarding the difference between a StringBuilder and a StringBuffer. At the time of the interview, I did not know the difference, so I told her I've only ever worked with StringBuilders. After the interview, I googled it and it turns out they do the exact same thing, except one is thread safe. I asked if she wanted me to continue with the string reversal code and she said no, to just leave it. Then she went on to ask me what series of Git commands I would use to accomplish a task. I don't remember exactly what the task was, but when I said I'd use rebase command, she was extremely confused as to what it was. I had to explain to her the difference between the rebase and merge commands. All in all this was a very unorganized interview.
Scheduled a call with recruiter. Recruiter didnt show up for the screening call and cancelled it 5 mins after the scheduled time. Dropped a follow up email and got no response. After a week, I got an email from the recruiter stating I am selected for the next round i.e Assessment. Sent me an email with the assessment description but no link. When I sent a follow up email asking for the link, I got ghosted again. It was a bad experience. Felt like she is toying with me. Why ghost an applicant repetitively? Unprofessional recruiter who doesn't respect an applicant's time or efforts!
4 rounds of interview including coding , design , case study, behavioral after clearing the code signal assesment. Coding was medium hard of 2 questions each. case study and system design was difficult.
This took a bit longer than expected, stretching over several weeks. The technical rounds were intense, featuring an LRU cache implementation and a problem on detecting duplicate transactions within a 60-second window. I was nervous at first, but it clicked for me when I realized I had practiced a similar approach on PracHub just days before. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive an offer in the end, but the experience was a solid learning opportunity. The behavioral questions felt straightforward, so I wish I had made a stronger impression in the technical segments.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Implement an LRU cache with get and put operating in O(1)