Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite un selezionatore. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Gradle Technologies nel mese di gen 2022
Colloquio difficile
Candidatura
Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. La procedura ha richiesto una settimana. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Gradle Technologies nel mese di nov 2022
Colloquio
After the introduction meeting with an HR person, I was asked to do a home code project. According to the public hiring process description, it is expected that the code project would require around 12 hours of work. It did take me around that amount of work to finish the project.
Two days after sending them my project, I was informed that they had decided not to continue the process with me and they gave me an option to meet with the HR person again to receive feedback regarding the code project. At the feedback meeting, the HR read the feedback written by engineers aloud. Of course , she was not able to elaborate on anything mentioned in the feedback. I asked her to share the feedback as text, but apparently that was also forbidden.
Feedback itself was pretty detailed, but a big part of it was discussing the flaws in the frontend part of the application. I had no idea why the test task for backend engineer contained a frontend part, so I implemented a very minimal frontend to support my solution. Apparently, it was a mistake. Some other mistakes included not meeting some requirements not mentioned in the specification. That could have been an interesting topic to discuss during the interview, but I did not get to see one technical person during the whole process.
Overall, this experience brought me back to my university student years, when the starting point of the exam was the belief in my worthlessness and it was made clear to me that I didn't deserve the time nor the attention of my examinators.
I don't know what kind of internal culture can produce this kind of interview process and at this point I don't want to know.
HR was nice though.
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
Implement a production ready web application according to specification given
The hiring process starts with a 1 hour talk with the SVP of engineering. This is a set o presentation about product / teams / hiring process / etc. The presentation were generally interesting and useful. What I missed is that the talk was a bit of a one sided conversation. They do not want to learn about you, your experience or skills at this point.
The next step is a code project. The task is to build a (seemingly) simple web application, based on a set of instructions in a PDF. The project is expected to "take about twelve hours to complete". You have 4 days to submit a solution.
The project is needed to be done is a given web framework. This was a new framework for me. But nothing seemed wrong with that, until I submitted a solution.
After submitting a solution, they rejected my application. After I asked for feedback, it turned out their actual requirements and expectations, were not really clear and far from what was in the provided instructions:
- what they expect is a fully polished, fully (/over) tested, production ready and bug-free project
- you're expected have tests from unit to top-level app tests (requirements only mentions "some automated test coverage")
- you're supposed to implement some use cases which are not clear and not even possible according to what is in the given instructions
Until this point in the hiring process, they showed like zero interest to learn more about my experience or skills. It is a bit unfortunate that they expect you to take a considerable amount of time doing the code project, but then they do no even take the effort to have a meaningful face-to-face conversation with you. This feels like a bit of a lack of respect towards the candidate.
We appreciate that you took the time to interview with us and provide feedback on your experience. We take all feedback seriously as we seek to iterate on our interview processes. If you would like to share additional information or have a more in depth conversation about your experience, please reach out to hr@gradle.com.
Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. La procedura ha richiesto 2 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Gradle Technologies nel mese di apr 2021
Colloquio
First talk of forty five minutes with the VP of engineering where he detailed explained more about the company and the opportunities they were hiring for.
Then, a take home assignment to be done in maximum four days.