Roblox SDE Tech Phone Screen Experience: Like Feature Design Interview

The interviewer was an EM from India, and the questions were the same ones from online interview experiences: designing a feature. The required functions included like/unlike, showing the total like c

The interviewer was an EM from India, and the questions were the same ones from online interview experiences: designing a feature. The required functions included like/unlike, showing the total like count, and showing if a user liked an item. When answering, the focus was on details, mainly on how to handle hotkey items. I mentioned using Kafka to handle burst requests, Redis + reconciliation for fast read/write, user-side approximation of like counts, sharding, etc. I felt I performed reasonably well throughout, and the interviewer's feedback was consistently positive. Two days later, I received a rejection letter, which felt completely unexpected. The feedback said my details weren't detailed enough. He wanted to hear about the appearance of Redis keys and the general look of queries when reading and writing to the database. During the interview, he mainly asked high-level questions, not these details, so I didn't know he wanted me to answer those... Even more ridiculous was that he said my strength was "clarifying the question well." Seriously... even a donkey would be able to "clarify the question well" just by seeing a question! 😓 I've interviewed over a hundred people myself, and even with the worst candidate, I can find two or three things to praise. Unlike others who write "clarified the question well"... it feels like the interviewer never intended to pass me in the first place, lol.