DataStax interview questions

I applied online. The interview process started with a brief phone screening, then a Cassandra real ticket was assigned as a technical test. It took me about 40 hrs to finish the test. I liked the test a lot the engineer assigned to answer my questions was very helpful and we had a good working experience, I succeeded in the test and my solution was simple and neat. The skype interviews were the tiring ones, they have people scattered around the world and I had different times for each interviewer (total 6). Most of the interviews went fine, they were mainly asking me about my previous job experience and also most of the technical questions were based on Multithreading and how to detect a deadlock situation and avoid it. I did a quick reader/writer test with one of the technical lead online, I was thinking about an optimum solution that I missed some basic points, the classic problem states that multiple readers can proceed and they have to be blocked if a writer gets the lock, the solution the team lead wrote was not optimum readers were blocking each other and I missed to point it out. At the end I didn't get an offer, I was upset because they failed to recognize a good software engineer, I was someone who never worked on non SQL DB before, I had no distributed systems experience and yet I went through Cassandra code base and crafted a solution that works and tested it locally and on distributed nodes. I don't see how some silly Java questions taken from some sites would give you a better idea on someones technical abilities, if I knew they would go that route I would have printed out the 100 most asked interview question and memorized them, but I think that's silly, I don't memorize the API!!!

I initially met some DataStax employees at a local meetup. It was a lot of fun; they were very friendly and open. After I started the application process, I talked to an HR person over the phone for 30-45 mins. She discussed the role and verified my technical skills. Next, I talked to a team lead over Skype for about an hour. We talked about some technical topics and some team dynamics topics. Finally, they assigned me a live ticket from the Cassandra task tracker, and asked me to submit a code patch. This was challenging, as it involved get the codebase up and running, and digging through a lot of undocumented legacy code in order to tackle the issue. I estimate it took 25 hours overall. They put me in touch with a senior engineer and their dev IRC channel for help, but the engineer was very terse, the chat channel was pretty dead, and I found it hard to ask for help without seeming like I was struggling. Overall I felt it was an unforgiving way to test an engineer. In the end I did not complete the ticket, as the time required to completely solve the issue was interfering with my interview schedule with other companies.