I applied through other source. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at HelloFresh (Berlijn) in Jul 2021
Interview
THEY reached out to me through a recruitment agency, I didn't apply. And then after making me go through FOUR interviews, they said they didn't have something that would fit me as I don't have enough management experience, something that was very visible from my CV and they already knew before THEY reached out to me. But they still tossed me around from interview to interview, complete nonsense.
To add to that, they never actually replied, they said they'll reply within a few days, a week passed and I contacted the recruitment agency who told me that they received a reply but assumed that it was sent to me as well. I think that tells you how much they respect and value people.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard management questions, nothing too complicated.
I applied online. I interviewed at HelloFresh (Berlijn) in Apr 2021
Interview
The interview process was a joke. First of all, I applied for the Engineering Manager position, however, HR started interviewing me for the Principal Engineer position. I only noticed this at the end of the first interview. Apparently, they don't read applications or CVs well.
Anyway, I was invited to the technical interview for the Engineering Manager position afterwards.
I supposed to do the interview with two people from the company. An engineer, and a Director. However, the Director didn't show up, so I was alone with an engineer who recently got promoted to the squad-lead position. That was quite disappointing because 1) one-man interviews are usually problematic since you can't rely on a single person judgment 2) you would expect someone with a higher title in the room, especially for management positions and it was missing without no prior notice.
Unfortunately, the interviewer wasn't enough experienced and he gave a negative impression to me about the company. For example, when he mentioned "some EMs are more technical, some aren't", I asked how roles don't conflict with the Principal title. His answer was "we only have 1 principal, we are also still learning about this title" etc.
The whole interview was kind of an infrastructure oriented system design talk, that one can hardly correlate to a people-management position. At the end of the interview, there were only 3 minutes for my questions because the interviewer stuck with event-driven architecture questions.
So it turns out HelloFresh has a huge PHP legacy with no clear architectural pattern. They have been migrating to GoLang but they don't seem to have a structured plan for this. There is a huge title confusion within the company. Some EMs code, some doesn't, and there is the Principal role that they don't know well. The interview process was very amateur for a publicly listed company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Similar to infrastructure-level design systems questions. Lots of event-driven design questions (almost %70 of the interview).