Interviewed for Zalando Helsinki. First, there was very tedious long-lasting process of preliminary interviews. First one or two interviews took multiple weeks to organize. Why hire all the HR/recruiter people if they are absent/busy for weeks. Can’t Zalando afford to hire more then? 🤷‍♂️ Afterwards there was the interview with one of the technical leads. The person seriously tried to convince me that writing automated tests is not always a good idea and in some cases they are a nuisance and they interfere with the development process. :) Really? Then we had some small disagreement about weather (or climate in Helsinki, to be precise; seriously, I’m not making that up) and some feeling of tension was in the air since that. After the interview as a feedback I was told that as a lead (I came from a position of a tech lead in a startup) I was expected to be doing more architectural work and planning and not hands-on coding. Really, in a startup with less than 4 developers frantically trying to put out the MVP, I should have spent more time on architecture? Did Zalando need developers? Why reject based on weather preferences then? Why reject developers with more than a decade of experience at all? Overall the process was not that nice either. There was no office tour, not too much friendliness, etc.