Well it started with usual phone screening through HR, which lasted for about 25 mins. I was asked to describe my background, career path, skills. After that I was told that telephonic a technical round would be scheduled with a senior technical panel.
That happened about 2 days later. Normal questions, but it was a rapid fire round, for a correct answer I was cut through and jump to next question. And tried to push and grill if I took time to answer. But there was just a developer, and a manager. Manager barely spoke 3 sentences. He wanted to know what my future career plans are for 2 to 3 years. I told I am willing to commit for a longer period. I cleared that too.
Here where things got interesting. The next step was a technical assignment. I was given the specification, and confirmed that there is no such deadline to finish. Once finish, I would need to put it on a Git repository. I was traveling so I couldn't finish it in one sitting. It took about 5 days for me. I completed 80% of the task. My H2 db wasn't connecting and one controller wasn't responding, also I skipped the JUnits altogether. Because I didn't want to make hiring team wait for more any longer.
I uploaded project to my Github. Created a separate repo for that. Given instructions what to do once it's pulled, it was simple 'mvn clean install spring-boot:run'. And I sent the Git repo URL to HR.
I waited for 3 days only to hear that I have not cleared the technical assignment, that was the end of the rope. I know that one cannot tell if your project is cloned or not. But the reason I was given, was very immature and silly. I was told that I do not have deeper technical skills required for the job. This came as an from the HR when I asked why my application has been turned down.
At least I could have been informed by one of the technical members, and pin pointed that this is not expected, this is not working, this is where your structure was weak. Or this is not what we wanted at all, or just push a text file to my Git repo, saying this is why it has been turned down.
This is not professional to turn down candidate without adequate reasoning. I've began to think that I was a better candidate than they expected.