There was an initial 30 minute call to go into more detail about my CV and the role.
That was followed by a 90 minute video call where I went into more detail on my past experiences.
First, I described the projects that I had worked on previously from a technical perspective, and elaborated on my contributions. I also had to give examples and describe how I reacted to challenging situations such as how I reacted to having caused an issue in a production environment.
That was followed by a technical exercise. We spent about 30 minutes on it. The exercise was to implement a blog system similar to TransferWise's technical blog.
It was unclear if it was a system design exercise or a coding exercise; I approached it as a system design exercise, collecting requirements and describing the system, but they also wanted me to code.
I gave a high-level overview how the system would work, what services and applications would be used, what features it would have, how the user would interact with the system, etc. They seemed satisfied with that approach but also wanted me to implement a solution. Code-wise I started defining some of the data structures and describing how they would support the solution but didn't implement anything else.
A few days later I was told that I had been rejected. They said they had candidates that were a better fit for the role, and that I did poorly on the coding exercise.
In my opinion, the format of the technical interview was just not good. They tried to accomplish too much within a very short amount of time (learning about my work experience, my behaviour in the workplace, my system design skills and my programming skills).
It was also not well structured, because they didn't clearly separate the different parts of the interview, which resulted in having less time for the coding exercise.
I think the worst problem though is the coding exercise. I was asked to develop a system with multiple components and a lot of complexity and then told to implement it in a HackerRank-style online editor.
I was given little instructions besides here's the problem, solve it, also here's a text editor. Was it a system design exercise? Was it a coding exercise?
What was I supposed to implement, exactly? The frontend application? The multiple backend services that I defined? Or a dumbed-down version as a Java application? And I had to do it in under half an hour.
I could have easily showed my skills in either frontend or backend development, but I didn't really have an opportunity to do so due to the type of interview that was conducted.
Ultimately, I can understand why they used this interview format. It's much quicker than having several interviews, which with its dedicated purpose and enough time to actually do them properly. Given the company profile and the amount of interest that they get from applicants, they can afford to filter out a lot of them at an early stage by doing so. I will say, though, that it makes for a terrible interview experience and likely a bad recruitment process as well, because a lot of great candidates might just not understand the interview format or not have enough time to display their skills properly.
