Applied online, was emailed by a recruiter after a few weeks inviting me to onsite.
I got to pick between Richmond VA, McLean VA, and Plano TX. I chose Richmond VA.
I was given a hotel to stay in for the night. Pretty nice place. The next morning I headed over to campus.
The day started off with a tour of the campus (very nice), then lunch, and then interviews.
First round was behavioral. The interviewer did not look at my resume or ask questions regarding it, instead he asked 3 questions verbatim off of his laptop and didn’t expand off of them. They were as follows:
Tell me about a time where you explained a technical problem to a non-technical person.
Tell me about a project that you are the most proud of.
Tell me about a time where you had to learn something yourself.
Afterwards I had the case-study interview. The interviewer was kind of rude, and kept making snide remarks about how dumb the questions he had to ask were. He kept smirking and laughing at me whenever I asked any followup questions, and when I mentioned a company on my resume he scoffed at it. Once we got started on the actual question, he had a coughing fit and had to leave the room. Upon returning, he asked me to come up with a solution. I took a broad guess (that happened to be right) and he accused me of having seen the question before because I arrived at the solution too quickly. Pretty terrible experience.
Question 1:
Capital One has acquired a smaller company that does online-only banking. What are some challenges involved with integrating that companies code into Capital One’s system as quickly as possible?
Question 2:
Here is a piece of code from that smaller company. Tell me what the expected output would be (It was a ton of confusing and poorly formatted if statements)
Question 3:
Refactor this code to be written in the best way possible (the entire method was able to be summed up into a ternary operator or 1 if-statement)
Finally, I had the technical interview.
Question 1:
Using OOP principles, design a banking system that contains customers. each customer can have any number of accounts. Those accounts can either be checking or credit, and are required to have all of their transactions logged.
I wrote mine out in a UML-style diagram. The interviewer cut me off after a few minutes because he could “see where [i] was going with this”.
Question 2:
Given a binary tree of positive integers, return a binary tree where any sub-tree that has a root of 0 and children of null (or zero) are removed. (similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-tree-pruning/ )
Question 3:
Given n US dollars, write a method that returns an array of Euro denominations that sum up to the converted value in Euros using the least number of bills and coins (similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/coin-change/)
2 business days later, I recieved an email letting me know I was not selected.
I felt pretty strongly in the behavioral and technical interviews, but that case interview really threw me off. Mostly because of the attitude and demeanor of the interviewer.