I was contacted by a recruiter for job ID(21632) who was supportive and cooperative. She clearly explained the salary components and openly acknowledged that they couldn't match my current salary, which I appreciated for her honesty. Since I was looking for a change anyway and Pega’s office in Hyderabad was conveniently located near my home, I decided to give it a try.
The first round took place a few days later and included algorithmic puzzles, a basic linked list question, discussions on time complexity, and some concurrency-related topics. As the first round went well, they scheduled a second technical round.
According to HR, this was supposed to be another technical interview, but it started with the interviewer asking why I was switching jobs within a year. This discussion went on for about five minutes. The next question was whether I would accept a higher-paying role working on monolithic applications instead of microservices, which led to another ten minutes of discussion followed by few more questions which mostly asked at director or senior director level. Finally, he seemed to realize this was meant to be a technical round and asked me to merge two sorted linked lists. I wrote the code in Notepad as per his request (he was against opening IDE), and there may have been a missing closing parenthesis in one of the while loops. He asked me are you sure it will run and it's a production grade code, I request him let's open IDE and run it once. Without further discussion, he abruptly ended the interview, saying, "Okay, I’m done. Do you have any questions?"