I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Revolut in May 2024
Interview
This was not an interview, but the interviewer’s self-assertion by humiliating the candidate. The test itself is not aimed at identifying your experience or depth of knowledge, but simply whether you can code quickly. After the task there are comments like “yes, your level is definitely not up to the level of Revolut”, “you position yourself as a Senior, why don’t you have developed live coding skills”, “knowledge in testing is rather weak”. How did you manage to understand this on some elementary boilerplate cases that are usually not written by hand?
There were no questions at all about the intricacies of multi-threaded processing, atomicity and asynchronous collections that the recruiter spoke about. There were no Senior level questions either.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Just a simple project to complete. Read Android Recommended Architecture article + an article about Clean Architecture on Wikipedia and you will manage.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Revolut
Interview
First I did an interview with the recruiter, he was very kind and helpful, he asked me some technical questions and explained the rest of the process.
Afterwards I did live coding, which was not excessively complex and I was able to continue the process.
The third interview was half live coding, with an exercise mainly to evaluate my knowledge about concurrency, and a theoretical part. This part seemed a little unfair to me since I was able to find a solution that I think was efficient, although it was not the most efficient. In the theoretical part I answered most of the answers briefly, because we had less than 30 minutes, and hoping that if they wanted to go deeper into a topic, they would tell me, but it didn't happen and it was a negative point on my side.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Database indexes, isolation levels, partition vs sharding, cqrs, stability patterns, types of deployments
I applied online. I interviewed at Revolut in Feb 2024
Interview
I sat my 'live coding' interview a week ago and still have not been told if I have passed or not.
My experience during the first round interview was good. I was caught a little off guard by being asked some technical questions during this round but I assume that is by design. I was then invited to book a `live coding` interview along with instructions on how best to prepare and the expected coding environment that needed to be setup and working prior to the interview starting. All very professional I was fairly impressed.
The `live coding` interview was OK. They put a large emphasis on using TDD but also completing the task to a production quality. These two concepts do work a bit against each other when you have such a small amount of time. Eg: For a production quality function I would (and did) spend a lot of time validating the input to the function. (eventually the interviewer did tell me to not worry anymore with input validation) but by then I had wasted a bunch of time. The interviewer did not provide me with any kind of requirements which again goes against the time factor by having to build my own set of requirements by asking questions or coding in the wrong direction for some time.
My real issues started after the `live coding` interview. My expectations for when I would know if I passed the interview or not were set at the end of the interview. My interviewer thanked me for attending and told me that he would let the recruiter know straight away.
The next day I sent an email to the Revolut recruiter asking about the result. I received nothing back for another 2 days. I was told the recruiter would ask about the result and get back to me as soon as possible. After another day waiting I send another email to which I still haven't received a response.
I have been polite and have asked about when I could expect to hear the result of my interview so as to correctly set my clearly non realistic expectations of the time line. I have had little to no response form Revolut and the professionalism and preparation I afforded them has not been reciprocated at all.
I can now only assume that I did not pass the interview and have simply been tossed aside. I hope I simply fell through some kind of internal process and this is not how they treat people and conduct their business.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Live coding: write a URL shortener in java using TDD.