VMware Interview Experience 2021

I was referred to VMWARE by a friend for Senior Member of Technical Staff. I got a call from HR followed by an email with a Zoom interview link. The email also contained a hackerRank link for pair coding.

There were 3 back to back technical interviews scheduled. All the interviewers were very friendly and understanding.

Round 1: 

1. Explain the architecture of the current project. What all design patterns have you used so far and why?
2. Algorithm for URL shortening. How will you design the entire end-to-end system and then scale it to tackle more requests and so on?
3. Explain Synchronization in java. Explain Locks. Write your own program that will contain two methods 
   • acquireLock()
   • releaseLock()

   Write your own code that will handle multiple threads entering into the critical section using the above two methods.

4. Write an algorithm to reverse a singly linked list. What will be the time and space complexity if you do it in an iterable fashion and what would be the time and space complexity if you do it in a recursive way. 

Round 2:

1. Tell me about yourself and the projects that you have worked on recently.
2. Design a system for reviewing the code in a software company. What APIs will you use? How many of them will be GET, POST, PUT and DELETE? What design patterns would you use and why? How will you make the system fault-tolerant and scalable?
3. Given a list of words, arrange it in a way as if they are present in the dictionary in an alphabetic fashion and provide the nth (say, second last) word present in the dictionary created from these words.  

   cat,bat,rat,king,queen,wise,long,zoom,vmware  
   Constraint: The algo should be time-optimized.

   Which sorting algo will you use and what will be the time and space complexity?

4. Why JAVA is the most popular language widely used? What makes it stand out from other programming languages.

Round 3 :

1. Detailed discussion about the architecture current project. How are you deploying the applications? What databases are being used, and why? etc.
2. Few questions about multithreading, race condition, thread safety, and locking mechanisms. How will you handle concurrency in java collections?
3. What is serialization? How will you achieve it in JAVA? How it internally works? What is the use of the transient keyword?
4. System design for amusement park management.
5. How you are handling authentication currently in your project?