No proper planning. Interview got scheduled for HLD and LLD round but DSA was asked. Even after solving DSA, I wasn't shortlisted for the next round and no proper explanation was given.

Round 1 – Technical Straightforward. One easy LeetCode-style problem Basic JavaScript conceptual questions This round went smoothly. Round 2 – Technical (Supposedly LLD) This round was poorly structured and misaligned with what was communicated. I was explicitly told this would be a Low-Level Design (LLD) round. Instead, the interviewer started asking DSA problems like: Quick Sort Merge Sort Tower of Hanoi These were not mentioned in the expectations for the round. Then I was asked to make an API call using a URL that actually returned HTML (text stream) instead of JSON. The interviewer himself seemed confused about the endpoint. I was asked to “google” how to handle streams using fetch, which I did and implemented successfully. Later, he realized the URL was wrong and provided a correct JSON endpoint. After that, I was asked to call the API 5 times at once. Terms like rate limiter and queue were used, but the requirement was never clearly explained. I initially discussed rate-limiting algorithms, assuming that was the expectation. Only later did it become clear that he simply wanted concurrency control with a fixed parallel limit. I eventually completed the task, but the expectations kept changing mid-discussion, making the round unnecessarily confusing. Overall Feedback The interviewer appeared unprepared and unclear about the problem statements. The round deviated significantly from what was communicated beforehand. Ambiguity and incorrect inputs (wrong API URL) added avoidable friction. This negatively impacted what could have otherwise been a solid interview experience.