They started off with a 30min phone screening. Nothing too crazy. Position and work environment sounded average after the conversation.
They wanted me to complete a coding assessment before they were willing to set up a 2nd interview. They said they were interested in seeing how I think about code and go about solving problems. Fair enough, pretty standard. However, this coding assessment was homebrewed and far more involved than it should have been. I was expecting a 2 hour test on Codility or Hackerank, but that was not the case
This is when I learned that no one in the hiring office is a Java engineer. They apparently outsourced the proctor of this assessment to a remote resource they had in their Alabama office.
The engineer in Alabama was responsive, but wasn't too helpful when it came to clearing up requirements. I ended up having to rewrite my code a number of times because I had made some incorrect assumptions that were corrected later. That's pretty typical for corporate IT, but I would not expect this from a coding assessment.
The assessment itself wasn't too challenging, but was time consuming and was about 5 requirements too long for simply testing “how an engineer thinks and approaches a problem". I built the application with Maven, implemented TDD methodologies, left detailed comments in the code, and sent it out to the proctor.
They invited me in for a second round, and I was told to prepare for a technical screening and whiteboard test, as well as questions regarding my job history. It seemed redundant to me to include a technical screening and whiteboard interview given the extent of their coding assessment and the amount of detail I put into it. After all, this is a "plumbing position" at a non tech shop. They aren't a Big 5 company, but whatever. I brushed up on my algorithms and whiteboard educate, and got ready to solve some problems by hand on the fly.
When I arrived I was lead to a room with 3 people, but because no one in the room codes in Java, they dial into a conference call with the Java engineer that proctored my assessment for the technical portion. The 4 of us sat there, awkwardly staring at a polycom while a voice on the other end began the technical screening, which was clearly him just Googling "Java Technical Interview Questions". He started going down a list of terminology and checked how well I had the answers memorized. Needless to say, I bomb it. I can code in Java, I just proved that by writing an extensive application utilizing best practices and modern methodologies and getting invited here... but now you're going to get a sense of my real abilities by seeing how well I answer a question about the 4 different scenarios in which one would use the static keyword?
And that was their technical screening. Coding assessment ignored. No whiteboard. Just a series of "Do you know this answer? No?" questions. This segment of the interview was also not a conversation. The engineer read me a question from the website he was looking at, I answered, he paused, and then he asked another. There was no dialogue, no back and forth, no exploration of knowledge, and no feedback.
The rest of the interview was pretty routine but was awkward because now the 3 non java developers in the room didn't think I knew Java, and the engineer at the other end of the line went on mute when he completed his part and continued to work on whatever it was he thought was more important (you know how conference calls are). Therefore, their lines were crossed: the people in the room had my resume with my job history, skill set, and accomplishments, and the person on the phone had the proof to back it all up, but instead of communicating with each other about it they decided to zone out due to my lack of terminology memorization. It felt like sabotage.
One thing that would have made this whole process immensely better would have been to screen me with the Java terminology questions they found online right off the bat in our initial phone conversation so I would have failed immediately, and wouldn't have - A) spent my valuable free time clarifying convoluted requirements and coding them into a working application, B) wouldn't have spent more free time brushing up on algorithms and whiteboard educate that wasn't even used, and C) wouldn't have taken a day off work to visit them onsite only to be asked questions by a faceless developer on speaker phone.
I'm still wondering if they are actually using the code I sent them for my "assessment," and that's why it was so extensive. It is, after all, their property.