I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Charles Schwab in Sept 2021
Interview
Worst interview experience ever!
This is how the interview started - I called in, the interviewer did not introduce himself nor did he ask for my introduction, he said here is the coder pad link open it and share your screen.
May be he is soft spoken, that's fine I thought
I solved the first problem about a string easily,
He gave the second one which is based on arrays which I could not solve but I was trying to explain myself, he did not give any hints or I doubt if he was even listening to what I was saying. He finally said," I don't think it's going to work let's move on to the next problem" rudely. That's the moment I lost the total respect towards the interview.
He asked if I know data structures and linked lists, I said I don't know even if I know.. He gave another problem (by this time we are already part the interview time) I solved it uninterestedly and fast but I solved it. After that he started to ask about me and my project experience since I had another meeting coming up and the interview was already 20 minutes over the set time slot. I gave a brief 1 minute introduction and stopped there.
He did not introduce even by the end of interview. Did not turn on his camera, he was on mute most of the time, whenever he unmuted I can clearly somebody else talking and there was a lot of noise which was quite distracting. I hate to say this but being an Indian myself, people like this interviewer bring a lot of disrespect to the whole community. He was very unprofessional.
All the problem solving questions he asked are straight from Gayle Lakmam book, he did not have the knowledge to prepare his own questions. if you read the book you can clear this interview there is no need to prepare any of oops concepts , .net.. You might even put fake experience in your resume and it does not even matter to them because they did not question any of that. I applied for SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER not for a fresher job.
I was totally frustrated after the interview. The recruiter did not even bother to send a rejection email, honestly after the interview I did not want to join the company anyway.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
how to check if two input strings are rotated versions, e.g.,: waterbottle, tlewaterbot
Gave an array of 1s and 0s and asked to code for the biggest subset of all 1s
Gave an expression and asked to check if it is a properly closed expression, e.g.: {(56 + 45} + (5+6))
I applied online. I interviewed at Charles Schwab (Southlake, TX) in Sept 2025
Interview
Had a virtual interview with a manager. Normal enough. At the end he tells me that he is going to schedule an in person interview. He tells me this interview will cover technical troubleshooting, along with some design and architecture with a white board.
I get to the site, someone picks me up in the lobby and takes me to a conference room. He then starts a Teams meeting where the other interviewers then join the Teams meeting.
So they had me come in person to one of their sites so that all of the people interviewing me could do so virtually.
Throughout the entire interview only one of the interviewers turned on their camera, which was for the (roughly) 5 minutes he asked me questions. Other than that the people from Charles Schwab were faceless blocks on a Teams meeting.
Of the hour and a half interview there was maybe 10 minutes of conversation around troubleshooting or design. The rest of the interview was 95% random java questions, most of which seemed like they were things the interviewers had done or used sometime within the last 24 hours or questions that were taken from an Oracle Java certification exam.
The person who asked the most questions could barely be understood. Even the other Charles Schwab person that came to get me from reception couldn't understand what he was asking. Cheap microphone + Teams = having to ask someone to repeat themselves at least three times, which makes you look like a jerk.
We did actually need the whiteboard, they wanted to me write some code on it for an entry level software position, because who doesn't write their best code on a whiteboard.
The behavior of the people from Charles Schwab seemed unprofessional and felt unprepared. To have someone come for an in person interview only to have the interview be on Teams was rude.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What steps would you take to scale a product from 700 users to 1,000,000?
2 rounds in total. Both were technical. First was more like an easy one. mostly my previous work experience discussion, and it lasted 45 minutes. The second round went on for 2 hrs
Virtual interview process with 3 board members in the team and took almost 1 hour to interview me to get the technical questions answered.
Tell me about yourself and .net core with authenication and authorization.