NetApp Software Engineer interview experience

The first round focused on checking my data structures and algorithms fundamentals, and I felt like I could reason through what they were testing. The second round started from DS&A too, but it quickly shifted into a “tricky” problem—something where the key step wasn’t obvious unless you’d seen a similar pattern before.

I ended up spending time trying to invent the approach from scratch, and that made it feel genuinely hard, not just challenging. I didn’t get the impression they were trying to coach me toward the known solution; it was more like they wanted that specific insight to show up