Confluent SD interviewer ended the round 15 mins early
Just got rejected by Confluent after 4 rounds and I'm honestly kind of annoyed.
Both coding rounds were fine. Tail -n implementation, got through the tradeoff discussion (buffer vs pointer), search phrase problem. Felt solid on both.
SD rounds were another story. First one was the temporary email system and the interviewer was barely there. Zero engagement, she literally had 15 minutes left and basically said let's just wrap up. I hit bloom filter, api design, scaling, covered the whole thing. Nothing. Just vibes.
Second SD round went slightly better but I still got the sense he'd already made up his mind by the time I started explaining anything.
Recruiter came back saying I passed coding but failed both SD rounds. "Not that far off" was the feedback. Cool, super helpful.
Felt like the question pool wasn't that varied tbh. I prepped what I could find and went in feeling pretty covered. But apparently it doesn't matter if your SD interviewers have already checked out mentally.
Idk what I was supposed to do differently.
Replies (4)
had a similar experience at another company where the interviewer was checked out the whole time. got rejected too. some interviewers just shouldn't be running loops
that's rough. failing SD when the interviewer barely engaged sounds like a coin flip not an eval
"not that far off" is the vaguest feedback possible lol. sorry this happened
passing both coding rounds is no joke. frustrating that SD is the bottleneck when the interviewers aren't even present
the early wrap-up is wild. did you push to keep going or just let it end?
kind of just let it end. she made it clear the round was over. didn't want to force it