A recruiter reaches me via LinkedIn and talked about an opportunity in Klarna.
They are expending their business in North America and wanted to hire some engineers in Toronto. I was the first few interviewed in Toronto.
The interview consists of 7 parts which I consider as excessive.
1. HR intro – 30 mins. Potential salary and stuff
2. Take away home quiz – 3 questions, 3 hours. Easy to medium
3. One coding interview – 75 minutes. Leetcode 1610
4. One behavioral round – 45 minutes
5. IQ test?? 20 minutes with your camera on, HR looking at you solving the puzzle.
6. One system design interview – 90 minutes
7. Another behavioral round – 45 minutes.
For the behavior rounds, the interviewers are okay. One of the behavioral round interviewers was late for the interview, and he started the interview while he was driving. I highly doubt he remembered everything before he fully parked his car. He then dropped off and reconnected with me after he is settled.
For the 2 technical parts, it’s definitely not good.
For the live coding one, they chose Leetcode 1610. I honestly cannot comprehend what the question is asking at the beginning as the interviewer only shows a block of text and ask me to read, until he, after 5 minutes, showed me a visualization of the question. I don’t know why they cannot show that in the first place. Also, the interviewer is not very active on giving hints, or just conversate. He mostly observed me, and that was it. I wrote the brutal force solution first and explained the queue solution for optimized algorithm as for writing the code, he said you can either write it in google doc or write it in the canvas UI. I spent tons of time align the code and indentation, where the time was wasted for nothing. I Googled the question after the interview and found the question has more dislikes than likes.
As the system design interview, I was given a question on designing a service to proceed one transaction before some transactions are fulfilled. I explained the APIs, the overall logic and such. The interviewer asked me why you don’t return 200 if the transaction cannot be processed. I said 200 means you are successful with the post event, and you may consider use 400 series of errors for client-side error. The interviewer keeps on mentioning, but there’s no user error. I said yes, but it's still invalid and we can consider using 422 which is unprocessable entity or worst case 206 which is partial content just to go with your 200 theory. Then he asked, what is 422? I was like okay. Then he reiterates himself that he likes 200 but with error messages inside. I was blown away, like is that even a good practise. How about l10n? Not to mention API client relies on status code more than the message. I believe my solution is correct, but you insist on yours, fine. I stopped argument right after I realize he might not be open minded. Then he asked about what language you want to write your code if you want this to be done in a week? Where do you want to deploy it? What metrics you want to monitor? I was like, we missed quite some context over here. Are we talking about an existing prod endpoint, or totally new? Is this an addition to some existing service? What’s the use case, and overall call volume. I must keep on asking questions like this. He said let’s say it’s a POC. I said if it is POC, you might as well use a micro pod to deploy on cloud? Or show on your local env? He asks what if there’s a huge volume? Honestly, to me the questions are too general. I know you should ask questions in your SFI, but not those and I thought the technical rounds should be the ones that are less opinionated or subjective, but it seems it’s not in Klarna.
Also, for the IQ test, I have absolutely no idea why it is required to begin with. The questions are basically observing the dots on 5x5 matrix and guess the next one according to the pattern. I asked the HR why this is even required, he said it’s a company tradition, and should you failed 4 questions out of 18, you will lose your candidacy. I should have failed here.
For the HR parts, I have sent a few emails asking about if we can expedite the process since I have 2 offers in hand, but I still want to give Klarna a try. They said sure, but nothing happened, same old schedule. About a week after my last round of interview they declined me with no rhythm and reason from a template email despite they mention feel free to ask any questions on the decision. I politely asked them about the reason why I failed, and I’d like to hear some honest feedbacks and you guessed it, nothing.
I got offers from FAANG company at the mean time and failed here, ironic.
