The first stage was a chat with the in-house receuiter. It was a really good conversation, I got a really detailed insight what they do, how they do it, and why.
After that my CV was presented to the CTO (or whatever was his title) who was generally impressed with my experience. So I got a take-home task. I had to implement a vending machine in Java with really vague requirements. I guess that was on purpose, so you have to think about features, trade-offs, concurrency, etc… when you make design decisions.
After 24 hours of sending it back, I got feedback. They loved my solution, the details, the design decisions were hugely the same as they would make.
So I got a next round scheduled a week later, when I had to go through the code and why I did what I did. It came handy that I spent way more time on the task then they expected. I added a very detailed description about the design decisions I made. I also added a basic Rest interface (it wasn’t a requirement) just to make it easier to test my solution. I also added detailed description about the request and response payload of these calls. I think it paid off, because not even after the 2 hours of the interview, the recruiter called me and told me that the CTO really impressed how I had come across and how I had approached the problem when they asked me to make changes due to new requirements.
So, I got the next two interviews scheduled for a week after.
The first one was a ways of working interview with a Frontend Engineer. It was interesting to talk about ways of working on the backend to an engineer whose experience didn’t go beyond frontend problems. Anyways, I got good preparation from their HR guy, so I told all those things what they like to hear. I had a weird feeling during the interview. This guy was really cold, not communicative, and it was a pain for him to do this interview, and he clearly didn’t want to be there.
The next interview was a general chat with someone from the leadership team. It was a very nice chat, i can confidently say we agreed on 100% of the topics we touched. Basically we had the same view on how an engineering team should work, and how an engineer should react to different situations.
I thought, I have my new job. But I couldn’t be more wrong about it. The HR person who was so communicative before ghosted me. I did not get any feedback. I got answers to my first two messages, claiming the decision makers were on holiday and after that the reqson changed to that they were having to busy workload and couldn’t provide the feedback. And I’ve never heard from them any more. They didn’t answer to any emails, WhatsUp text, nothing.
I put way more effort in this process then I should have to. Please don’t waste too much time on them, you’ll be ghosted at the end.