General Motors Software Engineer Interview Experience — Open-Ended System Design That Ran Fifteen Minutes Over

The interview was scheduled for 45 minutes.

The interviewer gave me a question that was roughly: there is an application that has to call three to five dependency services, and how do you guarantee a specific target for a specific service, for example access latency under 10 seconds and availability above 99%.

It didn't feel like a normal design round. It felt like a very open-ended discussion about solving and optimizing a problem. After we confirmed the requirements above and started breaking things down step by step, the interviewer kept jumping from a topic I hadn't finished talking about straight to another topic we hadn't discussed, or to a new requirement, so I spent a lot of the time just confirming the newly added requirements.

In the end it went 15 minutes over and dragged out to a full hour, and the feedback I got was that my result was incorrect.

The platform was Codility.