Walmart Senior Software Engineer interview questions

3 people took my interview. I felt that the interviewers didn't really ask relevant questions. 1st guy asked me questions about my past experience but found it difficult to understand what I was trying to explain. May be he was not interested and was astonished when I said that as a part of a feature we executed Groovy scripts from Java classes and the scripts were stored in database. To that his question was did you store serialized objects in db. He had a difficult time understanding that classes were compiled at runtime. BTW I wrote a recursive function that would give valid palindromes in a string and made it work for the test string. 2nd person probably worked mostly on binary data. His 1st question was on count set bits in a 32 bit integer. I admitted to him that I did not deal with binary data on daily basis and the last time i used bitwise operator was in school 10 years back. However, gave him an array based solutions where a I counted number of set bits but wasnt enough. Another question again on binary stream of data which again i converted to a string example and explained my approach. While explaining the apprach i started with general case ignoring all corner cases to which the interviewer said why are you not writing entire function. Then when I started writing entire function he said I spend way to much time in writing corner cases. REALLY?? Then he asked me a question about traversing all nodes of a graph. To which i gave him recursive solution with neighbors. He didnt understand the following java for loop for(Node n : nodeList) and he said why was i writing pseudo code. I explained that it was valid syntax but he didnt believe. I believe he was from a world where everything was binary and didnt deal with Java on daily basis and I was form a world that used JAVA and non binary data on daily basis. Honestly try to connect with the background of the person and ask questions relevant to your job. Testing algorithmic acumen of someone is one thing and but atleast make sure that you are asking the right question.

I would honestly say, this is one of my very dissatisfying and worst interview session in my entire 10+ year career. I was approached by an internal HR member who was prompt and nice enough in scheduling the interview for the UI engineer, But i felt that the technical interviewer himself was very arrogant and outrageous in his phone conversation right from the beginning. He called 30 mins later to the scheduled time, As soon as he called, he started pouring down questions one after the another with out any formal introduction or even checking what state i am in. Even though my resume boasted of designing UI for 20 AAA gaming titles, TV/Video UI for every major gaming console, mobile and web platforms with strong portfolio links, he reported to the recruiter that i lack basic skills and interest in UI . I even felt that he did not even go through my 10 page resume.Upon checking the interviewers's linkedin profile, I have noticed that he has not designed even a single UI in his careeer apart from vudu. He showed least interest in my vast experiences in video streaming and GUI including working for some big names like Microsoft, Verizon. At one point he even started ridiculing them. I think he was predetermined to reject me that day, he kept asking half baked questions and jumping to the next with out even listening completely as he showed least patience. so even after i cited references as the proof to my answers in the book(Elements of programming Interviews), he challenged that those answers are incorrect. Example Merging K Sorted lists( I gave him all 3 Heap/Priority Queue,Divide Conquer, Merge Sort approaches). None seemed to satisfy him even to the least, He did not consider they deserve partial credit , since he gave zero feed back to the recruiter about my coding abilities. Most of the time, he was bragging about himself, showing least interest in the other person. I wonder how a big company like walmart allows a single individual to be the supreme commander and the sole decision maker. I felt that that i would not have accepted the position, even if they did, offer, as their entire work culture, interview processes seemed very hostile and messed up. Heard of rumours about walmart's low wage and low level work ethics, Got a own experience and bitter taste of it for the first time