Linkedin messagesd a Codat recruiter. Process took about 2 weeks. I interviewed at Codat (London, England) in Feb 2023 Recruiter chat to align what you and the company are after (30 mins) Engineering chat to get to know your technical background and what you are looking for. Main topics were around - What Agile means to you, what you like about it, what works - Code reviews: What you look for, how you give and respond to feedback (30 mins) 2 hour technical First half is a paired programming exercise, you get a skeleton API project sent through before (make sure you get this as the link did not send to me initially and I had to ask the recruiter) and then in the interview are sent 2 ‘stories’ to work on. You create a fake datastore (I used a class that had a static dictionary to mock this) and then create a Post, GetAll and GetSum endpoint. Tips: - Brush up on JSON serialisation to make sure you can code API models from scratch that serialise into the controller when called from Swagger or Postman. - Think of what type of datastore you are using and be sure you know how to add to it (dictionaries have safe add issues for example). - Have Postman ready to go on your machine. - Know how to use the LINQ Sum function . - Talk out loud, ask questions, use the time to show off what you know even though you don’t have to actually do it. For example I talked about how I would implement input validation but didn’t actually do it as we only had an hour. - Talk about Unit tests and be prepared to write at least one to show you know what you are doing. Second half is a technical interview/ chat, starts with questions about you and then a set list after that. Rough topics I remember: - Same questions as the Engineering chat previously. - Unit test vs Integration tests vs E2E tests. - HTTP methods, rerouting, what requests look like (headers, body and query parameters). - Concurrency/Asynchronous questions, how they work pros and cons. - SQL vs NoSQL databases, pros and cons, when to use which and why, the differences in indexing. Extra credit question was the n+1 problem in SQL vs NoSQL. - CAP theorem, eventual consistency. - Horizontal vs Vertical scaling, pros and cons. - Monolith vs microservices/eventing architecture, pros and cons. - Cloud infrastructure in Monolith vs Microservices (they were looking for scalability answers). Tips: Relate it to your current/recent role if possible, use questions as an excuse to show off what you know. (2 hours) Final interview With the CTO and co-founder. Think about why Codat, and what your individual motivations and aspirations are for the next few years in your career. (30 mins)

I applied directly to Codat and had an interview with Codat last week. In general it is a pleasure interview. It took one week as they are expanding. The first stage was a conversation with one of their lead engineer. He asked me about HTTP, TCP/IP and scalability. The feedback was that I did answer right on HTTP, TCP/IP but my answer on scalability was a copy from internet so I dont know how to say. Then they said that I am not good enough for a senior level, then asked me to go with mid-level which is still in my expected salary. I went to final round that took 2.5 hours. First hour was a pair programming where they will sent you a blank Web API and you have to demonstrate your coding skill as well as problem solving skill by building a payment api. For me it was fairly easy. I applied TDD which they said it was good and they've never seen other candidate produce too many line of codes as mine. During the pair programming, they said there is no right and wrong answer here and you can discuss and ask as many questions as you want and they are here to help. Task 1 was working. During task 2, I created a test, then I found that my code design was not correct then I immediately changed it and it was also working. However, they said I did not understand the requirement and made mistake, even I corrected it and make it work with TDD approach. So I dont understand what the point when they said they are here to help. Also, what is the point of pair programming when you dont tolerant a fault during developing? or what are their criteria for pair programming? so please dont jump to their trap. Next, I got a technical round with one of their EM. She asked me about 20 questions in 1 hours from C#, Unit Test, Testing, CI/CD and so on. I can say that I answered quite well on most of the questions. Of course, I am not genius to answer right all questions but I tried to answer in right direction. What I can see is that she had a list of well-prepare questions in her notebook and she kept looking to the book to ask a question but not a following question, that's I can say a very lazy interviewee. The feeback was I did not understand the task 2 then I did not start with right approach. It was a disappointing even I corrected and made it work as expected. Moreover, it looks like they dont care about my coding skills, communication skills, problem solving skills as well. Then they said that I am not good enough for a mid-level, it means I am a junior who can applied TDD and answered very well on many difficult questions on C#, CI/CD, Testing, Async. But as you know, if they dont want to give you an offer (I think because of my expected salary) then they always have reason to reject you.