All good until the technical interview. The task itself wasn't terribly complicated in hindsight, but the atmosphere was horrendous - the interviewer was snickering all the time and the task itself was on a very tight time limit. It was a very high pressure, unnatural environment which would never really happen in a working environment. Furthermore it did not feel like I was being tested on my actual knowledge of building software, rather things like string comparisons and arrays/hashmaps - this isn't a grad scheme. Not to mention the interviews go for 7 stages - that's like 2 months of time wasted to possibly be told 'no'.

First round is a meeting with HR where they go over your CV to see if you'd be a good fit for their requirements. The second round is one of these silly leetcode/hackerrank technical tests where half the interview is trying to figure out what on earth the problem is even asking. The answer involves string manipulation, use of hashmaps and some basic maths. However, this round is not a good judge of a software engineer. It's a pointless task with no real application in the real world. Why on earth would financial portfolio data be stored in an array of space separated strings? Eg "GOOG 10". Database ORMs, object orientation and dictionaries exist for a reason. I spent a good portion of the interview explaining how this data really should have been stored and didn't finish the solution on time because of this. Talking to the interviewer was like speaking to a brick wall too. No friendly discussion, barely a greeting when I joined the call and frequently racing to find something to correct you on. If the working environment is anything like this then I dodged a bullet.