I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Capital One in Oct 2021
Interview
Recruiter reached out to me to have a chat about whether I'd be interested in applying for a role at Capital One. After that is where the bulk of the interview process was:
1. online coding assessment with 4 problems and a 70 minute time limit - completing all is not required, you just need to get some minimum passing score and quality consistent code. Once you pass, you'll move onto scheduling the "Power Day."
2. Power Day Part 1: Algorithm Technical - count the number of primes (same as leetcode)
3. Power Day Part 2: System Design - design a smart meter system for an apartment complex
4. Power Day Part 3: Behavioral - 3 questions... tell me about a time when priorities changed and how you handled it, you successfully overcame a blocker and completed the task on time, and you had to work with someone difficult on your team and how to made it workable.
5. Power Day Part 4 - Technical Case - talked about pros and cons of capital one investing in a virtual chat system powered by machine learning (ML), what kind of data would be useful to feed that ML model, walked through some code that creates a lost of most recent event from a table, and how you would handle updating the code to support reading a different amount of events based on the object
I was rejected a few days after the power day via an email that just read "Thank you for your interest... [but] we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates at this time." No real feedback from a recruiter about how the process went. It would be nice to show empathy and reject someone with a personal email from the recruiter and give feedback on how it all went from the other perspective.
Interview questions [6]
Question 1
count the number of primes up to and including N
(204 on leetcode)
design a smart meter system that measures the electricity usage and reports the measurement every minute to a central service. tents and building managers should be able to view this data on a website while being able to view it by hour, day, week, month, and any interval in the past.
What are some pros and cons of capital one investing in a virtual chat bot and what kind of data would be useful to feed the machine learning model for it?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Capital One (Plano, TX)
Interview
I've been holding this in for months so that I could have some time to process this experience.
The weirdest part of the interview was that there was a person in one of my interviews who said they were " just there to make sure the process is being followed". That's definitely not a great way to make sure a candidate feel comfortable.
Also the recruiter told me that Capital One was broadening their hiring practices to be more inclusive of great talent who didn't have much Java experience but then one tech lead hammered me on java questions. I liked the recruiter, he was very kind and seemed like he genuinely wanted me to succeed in getting in. He prepared me well I felt like.
Also 3 of my 4 interviewers were good/great (all very nice) and one was a very poor interviewer and also lacked eq skills. Which was surprising since the more junior developer was more personable. Is this what being a leader at Capital One constitutes?
He was the technical lead who, the woman who said she was "just there to make sure the process was followed", sat in on.
That was super uncomfortable for me (and him I think). Additionally, he asked questions as if he assumed I didn't know them, as if he wanted me to fail the interview. Or at least he felt that way. When I answered the questions he just when right on to the next one...no questions asked.
This brings me to another point...feedback. At least 2, maybe 3 interviewers gave me feedback as I went through the process. This tech lead gave no feedback and just kept asking questions robotically. I am a human being. I have emotions. I am not a command prompt.
Another weird thing was that he asked me about CI/CD tools and I mentioned Jenkins and other tools I had worked in and also described how I used those tools.
Then he made a weird point of mentioning CircleCI which is the tool his team used, as if only that tool was the answer he expected. There are many many CI/CD tools out there. Shouldn't he care more about whether or not someone has experience in any tool rather than just their one.
It seemed like he really didn't want to give me a chance. I felt like I was written off. It made me question whether or not I was being discriminated against, I still don't know and I feel uncomfortable every-time I think about it. I even talked to a friend who used to work there and he thought the interaction I had with this tech lead seemed fishy.
I really feel like I dodged a bullet by not receiving an offer here. I have some friends who have worked there that have had less than spectacular experiences.
My advice, maybe Capital One is a good place to work. But be careful, the experience isn't super consistent across the organization. Maybe a great place for some, but it didn't make me feel very included overall because of this one tragic experience.
When I asked why I received no offer, the answer was that I did not have enough Java experience. Which honestly is a very fair assessment. I told that to them going into the process. Feels like a weird outcome for someone who mentioned that, passed the online coding assessment, went through a half day of interviews, studied the interview, and went through a long 1 month process trying to get hired.
Completed take home assessment. Involved coding a file manager system where you allocate memory blocks to files. A single block cannot store mutiple files. UI not required. No intereaction with kernel required.