I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at ThoughtSpot (Bengaluru) in Jun 2024
Interview
1. Exploratory call with Director. This round was good, the Director discussed well about the company, product and the role.
2. Online coding - Leetcode hard question.
3. After the previous round, no response or call from HR. The second online coding round scheduled for which no panel turned up. Completely ghosted!! I emailed the HR about status, no response.
4. Two weeks later, I get a call and they ask me to attend the second round. HR bluffed a lot about they were busy, financial year closing etc.
I decided not to take up the second round, cause I don't want to join a place where there's only fizz and no actual soda!!
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at ThoughtSpot (Bengaluru)
Interview
There were 5 rounds of interview. 2 Coding, 1 OOAD, 1 System Design and 1 resume walk through.
The interviewer told me that he would ask me 2 questions. Medium-Hard and easy. He asked me to select the questions. I thought he was a cool guy and serious about the evaluation process. I selected the so-called medium-hard question. The question asked was LeetCode Hard. This is a tag added by the LeetCode team.
I was given a LeetCode question created by google which was rarely asked in the interview. The question and examples were exactly copied from LeetCode on my interview collabedit and the interviewer told me the question is self explanatory. This is not at all acceptable that an interviewer is reluctant to explain the question.
He could not explain the questions and till the closer of the interview I never understood it.
When I searched leetcode, I found the question which again is the rarest question to ask in an interview. I am still not sure what he was trying to evaluate.
The interviewer never acknowledged the thinking process as he was expecting a fixed answer.
He gave me some clues but how can I proceed without understanding the questions. He assumed that the question is self explanatory whereas the rule of the game is if he asks a question, instead of asking me to read, he should explain rather than laughing and running through examples.
I tried to code but could not finish. Since 8 min was left I asked him to ask the next question. He again said it's a very easy question and would take 15min. If someone knows an answer its always easy. He did a better job with the question explanation for second questions but he put some constraint which was not good enough.
The interviewer extended for 20min and at the end asked me how was the experience in the interview. I thanked him and here I am sharing my experience.
I never needed Thoughtspot desperately as there are huge number of other companies. However, think about someone who considers thoughtspot as a dream company or needs a job desperately and meets these kinds of interviewers. Taking interviews is a very responsible task and people should be kind, understanding , respectful and sensitive.
This experience would stay with me for a while and I was not expecting this kind of experience from a company like Thoughtspot. You can ignore this but remember a lot of people would have their dreams shattered with these kinds of acts from your interviewer loose faith in the company.
I would suggest better guidance and training to the employees to not follow these kind of practices.
The question copied from the leetcode is number 803 with name Bricks Falling When Hit.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a log library
Design a memory allocator
Design Microservice Architecture
Bricks Falling When Hit
Construct a unique matrix n x n for an input n