The interview process had 3 rounds.
Round 1 — HR Screen, 20 minutes
Basic HR discussion. Nothing special.
Round 2 — CoderPad, 1 hour
Three simple coding questions in C or C++. The topics were linked list, BST, and basic C concepts. Nothing difficult here.
Round 3 — Technical Interview, 2 hours
This is where the experience became very disappointing.
The first hour started with an introduction. I mentioned that I had written bare-metal drivers, which is clearly listed on my resume. For some reason, the interviewer did not seem convinced and kept laughing whenever I answered questions. That was extremely unprofessional and disrespectful. I have no issue with tough technical questions, but laughing at a candidate while they are explaining their experience is unacceptable.
The main question was to implement a generic stack. I chose C and initially wanted to implement it using a linked list because the requirement was for the stack to grow dynamically. My reasoning was that if you request a very large contiguous memory block using malloc, an array-based implementation can fail, while a linked-list implementation can grow node by node.
Instead of having a proper technical discussion about trade-offs, the interviewer kept pushing back and insisted on using an array because linked lists are “not optimized.” I found that argument too shallow. Optimization depends on requirements, memory model, allocation behavior, cache locality, fragmentation, and expected workload. But instead of discussing those trade-offs properly, the interviewer was dismissive and kept pushing me toward his preferred approach.
I eventually implemented it using an array, but the experience was frustrating. It felt like the interviewer was more interested in forcing one approach than evaluating my reasoning. This made the interview feel unfair and unnecessarily hostile.
Overall, this was a very poor interview experience. The questions themselves were easy, but the interviewer’s attitude made the process unpleasant. I expected a serious technical interview, not someone laughing at a candidate and dismissing technical reasoning without a fair discussion.
Based on this experience, I would not apply to Arista again.
