Walmart | SSE | | Oct | Reject

The recruiter contacted me through a job portal and scheduled the first interview with only 12 hours' notice. They mentioned they were in a hurry due to an ongoing hiring drive. There was no mention of the hiring process or interview structure. The first round was a 20-25 minute phone call. The interviewer asked about my current project architecture and then asked me to solve the "Copy List with Random Pointer" problem from Leetcode. I cleared this round. The second round was a 30-minute onsite interview. The interviewer asked about my current project architecture and then asked me some Java and Springboot questions. The main coding question was: Given a list of kingdoms on a linear line with start and end points (e.g., [(4,8), (8,9), (12,15), (2,5)]), find the minimum number of bombs required to blow off all the kingdoms. Overlapping kingdoms need only one bomb. I initially thought this was similar to the "Merge Intervals" problem from Leetcode. I explained my approach to the interviewer, but he said that O(n log n) was a brute force solution and he needed an O(n) time complexity solution. I was unable to come up with a better solution. He did not allow me to write code because he was not convinced with the O(n log n) solution. At one point, he said that O(n log n) was fine, but O(n log n) + O(n) was not allowed. I told him that the order would still be O(n log n), but he disagreed. This was strange to me because I only look for the order of complexity. At the end of the interview, he gave me 10 more minutes and asked another question: Given two arrays of 0-9 integers (e.g., [6,8,0,0,5,6,7,6,7,4,3,6,9,9] and [5,9,6,7,4,3,5,6,8,3,5,6,7,6]), find which one of the two arrays will make the largest number if the digits are rearranged. Sorting was not allowed because he was looking for an O(n) solution. I was unable to figure out the approach in 10 minutes and the interview ended. However, I was able to figure out the solution later. My experience with the Walmart recruitment team was not good. The recruiters were highly unprofessional, possibly because they had outsourced the process to a vendor. They scheduled interviews at their own convenience without checking with the candidates. I have not received any feedback or email from the recruiter after the last interview, and I am hoping the reason is rejection.