My Interview Experience: VMware MTS -2

My Background:

B.Tech (CSE) :- 2014–2018 (Tier 3 college)

Years of experience:- 3 years as a backend developer

Previous organization:- ThoughtWorks

How I applied?

I got referred by an existing employee but never got shortlisted, a couple of weeks later I was approached by a recruiter. I did tell her about my existing offer from Amazon (please find the experience for that at https://aayumakkad.medium.com/my-interview-experience-amazon-sde-2-6bd9972abf7e) and she was fine with competing with it if it comes to that.

To get the referral you ideally want to follow the etiquettes of asking for a referral, some of which I have mentioned on my Linkedin as well at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aayush-makkad-551095127_i-am-very-generous-with-providing-referral-activity-6820592882353811456-k4O9

What was the process like?

Post the initial call with the recruiter the next 2 rounds were scheduled in the same week.

For me personally, there were more rounds than most people for some reason, there were 2 DSA rounds, 1 LLD round, 1 Hiring manager/HLD round, and the last director round.

There was no initial screening test since I was approached by VMware.

I haven’t signed an NDA with VMware but it’ll be courteous if i just provide question that are similar to what was asked and not the exact question.

First Round

First round was an hour long LC medium DSA round, it was more like a screening round wherein problems like Array rotation (https://leetcode.com/problems/rotate-array/) and a more difficult variatio of Overlapping rectangles (https://leetcode.com/problems/rectangle-overlap/) was asked.

I was already familiar with these questions so i quickly solved them in the most optimal way, post solution we discussed about how VMware is enabling its employees to cope up with WFH stress.

Second Round

Second round, just like the first round was an hour long LC medium-hard DSA round and this is where more interesting questions were discussed.

Interviewer was supposed to ask two problems but since we had 15 minutes left he gave me a LLD problem to solve as well.

First question was a very interesting question, i hadn’t seen this problem prior to this so it took me 5–7 minutes to find an optimized linear time and constant space solution. It was a variation of this problem https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/sort-linked-list-already-sorted-absolute-values/

Second question was a dynamic programming problem, i had already seen this problem so i quicky provided with him the most optimal solution. Problem was a variation of Word break (https://leetcode.com/problems/word-break/)

Since we had 15 minutes left, he asked me to design a custom iterator for arrays.

Third Round

Third round was an Object oriented design round wherein i was supposed to come up with requirements, figure out actors in system, identify use cases for actors, create a class diagram and then provide the contracts and interactions of these classes with each other.

This was also an hour long round but since we had 10 minutes left, he asked me about Spring and Futures/CompletableFutures in Java.

Fourth Round

This was the hiring manager round and i was interacting with him for the first time, we discussed over some HLD concepts, tradeoffs, monitoring etc.

He also asked me in what nature i have worked with the teck stack that i have mentioned on my resume and my and what i have excatly been doing since the last three years in the industry.

It was a very pleasant conversation wherein we discussed about the team andthe product that i’ll be working on, he also discussed about the pros and cons of joining amazon vs vmware.

Fifth Round

This was the last round of the process wherein we had a discussion about relocation, my prior experience and how Bangalore has a better weather than Delhi.

Since he was also once a developer we had a quick discussion about object oriented paradigm vs Functional programming and their tradeoffs.

Post this i was told that i have cleared all the rounds and i had to share my expectation considering my Amazon offer.

They provided me with the offer that i was asking for and since that is on the highest end of spectrum of MTS-2 salary ranges it makes me feel valued to some extent as well. 😊