A recruiter reached out to me and immediately setup a web interview with an Engineering Manager based in Switzerland. He mostly asked questions about my experience and things I've worked on. He dove into some technical details of past projects but nothing super technical or such. The interview went well so the next day I received an invitation for another web interview, this time was meant to be a technical one.
The technical interview was again via Web, with two of the Senior Engineering team based in the Singapore office. The technical interviews started with about 10 -15 minutes of chatting about past and current projects, own experience etc and then moved onto technical questions. The technical questions were really easy but none of them out of the ordinary, mostly about OOP principles.
The background of the Senior Engineer which was firing questions was in Scala while me coming from the Java world I found a little bit confusing what exactly was trying to ask me…Especially when we start talking about Lambdas and Functional Interfaces in Java or the Stream API. I mean, I end up talking about Parallel streaming and the overhead compared to a sequential one …etc or the advantages and disadvantages of streams over loops but I was under the impression that the interviewers were expecting something else…as in a different answer. I was asked about how would you refactor a code base so inevitably I had to mention about the Design Patterns, as in the Observer, Adaptor, Factory or Facade etc but again, I was under the impression that this was not enough.
The bottom line is that the team for which they were recruiting here in Dublin were supposed to be using Scala, Akka and nothing like Java in terms of development. I was actually happy to hear that because I have a strong interest in Scala and I was really happy that they would offer training so you can learn and play with something new altogether. They even asked if you have interest in learning new technologies and you are open to new stack. So without hesitating I said yes, because this is what I always do in my spare time. If in work I use Spring MVC at home in my spare time I will try Spring boot with Jwt tokens. If in work I am using Oracle, at home I will be looking into NoSql, Casandra and other stuff and so on.
In the end I was asked to send over some code written by self (if I have any). Since in my spare time I work on multiple small projects of my own I was able the next day to email a Spring boot app, which was the REST-ful API implementation for an mobile app Android and iOS and on top of that I also send in the code base of a CRUD app which was a Spring MVC with AngularJS and Thymelaf, including Spring security on top, Caching impl, JPA and Spring Data for persistence, HikariCP's impl for connection pooling etc
After two rounds of interview as described above I never heard back from Autodesk and this is really, really disappointing. I do not mind to be told that I failed and I am not a fit for whatever they are looking for. Being a professional I expect to be treat as such. I mean at the end of the day I took time off from work so I can attend 2 interviews so you expect at least some feedback in return. This is really annoying, not to mention that I’ve follow up several times and I was only told that they put “the status on hold”. I would somehow believe that (although I am writing this review after nearly 2 months after I had the interview) but currently a friend of mine just interviewed with Autodesk for a similar role here in Dublin with the same people from Singapore so I find it hard to believe that “my status is on hold”. A simple feedback would have been enough to be honest. Again being told “no thanks” is not the end of the world.