Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite segnalazione di un dipendente. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Giffgaff (Londra, Inghilterra) nel mese di mar 2026
Colloquio
Interviewed in March 2026 - process took around 2 weeks. Was broken up into 4 sections.
1. Quick call with internal recruiter (fairly standard HR screening)
2. Pair Programming Test
3. System Design Interview
4. Behavioural/Cultural interview.
Overall, one of the most positive experiences I've had while interviewing, feedback is taken seriously and is given at every step of the process.
Domande di colloquio [3]
Domanda 1
Pairing test: questions around Java/Spring + Coding Test to be done using TDD.
Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite un'altra fonte. La procedura ha richiesto 6 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Giffgaff (Londra, Inghilterra) nel mese di ago 2023
Colloquio
1st stage: quick call with People Engangement Manager
2nd stage: technical interview
The 1st stage was just an informal quick phone call to gather info about background, experience etc. The 2nd stage was a 90 mins technical interview with 1 hour of theory questions and half an hour left for a pair programming exercise, but I terminated the interview right before entering the coding exercise per se.
At the end of the theory questions we were ready to move on to the technical challange part, but I could see this was not going terribly but also not swimmingly, so I interrupted the interview. The guy was a bit surprised I chose to interrupt the process but didn't seem to mind ("fair enough").
Just before saying goodbye I still wanted to raise the point that there must be a discrepancy between such nit-picking theory-heavy interviews and the actual job in practice, since somehow I always perform very well at work, in companies that do hire me after making me do something like a home project but seem to struggle to come across well in academic-style interviews.
Just a nonchalant comment I felt like making about a process I've just been part of, but the interviewer decided to respond with something like "you need to know how the language works at least", which was a bit patronizing towards someone like me who, I've made sure to let it be known, is somehow relied upon for a great deal of code contributions and delivers at least at the same level as the senior developers (my managers' words, not mine). I don't know how that'd be possible without "at least knowing the language".
Unless I made a mistake and was actually interviewing for a CS college professor position.
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
- why did Java introduce wrapper classes and what are they
- can you pass primitives to collections
- difference between instantiating new Integer(1) and Integer.valueOf(1)
- is the string pool limited
- what is the contract between equals() and hashCode()
- what happens when hashCode() is overridden
- is concatenating strings with "+" good practice
- what is StringBuilder
- what is StringBuffer
- is StringBuilder thread safe
- what happens when trying to append strings with StringBuilder through multiple threads
- how can concurrency problems be solved
- how to make an object immutable
- what is a singleton and are they scoped
- ever dealt with aop
Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite un selezionatore. La procedura ha richiesto un giorno. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Giffgaff (Uxbridge, England) nel mese di mag 2021
Colloquio
Live coding of a web api - java / springboot to create a palindrome checker. Full TDD using Mockito, but basically the usual spring rest api. This was basically done remotely using my IDE.