The recruiter reached me at the beginning of November 2020. As they told me, they are setting up brand new software development teams in their Amsterdam office. After I told them I want to continue the process, I got my first interview invitation after three weeks. The first interview was with an engineering manager who oversees these new teams. He was a good guy whom I enjoyed interviewing. He asked me about my background and past experiences. I also explained to him how I want to continue my career. He stated that they are looking for people with some financial knowledge, which I have. He told me that the next step would be a technical interview but with a surprise. This technical interview will be a pair programming session, which has to be remote. I wanted to learn the reason since it is an interesting way of interviewing during this period. He told me that they hired contractors to start the foundation. But later, they decided these contractors should decide on the interview procedure and do interviews. These contractors decided that everything should be done by pair programming, even interviews. In my opinion, this can't be determined by contractors because they are going to leave the company. Three weeks later, I got the invitation for the technical interview. The recruiter told me that it would be a 2-hour session, and I should prepare the environment that I will be comfortable. There were two contractors as interviewers in the session. We started coding a URL shortener backend application. They were very rude from the start and criticized everything until the end. Their comments were not to improve pair programming but to block and demoralize me. After this technical interview, the recruiter reached to tell me that they want to continue the next step of the interview. I told him that I don't want to continue because of the technical interview, and I don't want to work with people like them.

The interview process consists of two stages. The first stage is a technical call with a Senior Software Engineer (SSE), where general questions are asked to assess your technical knowledge. The second round of the interview is quite extensive and includes coding, system design, and behavioral assessments. During the coding segment, you will be presented with an ASP.NET project and asked to review it as if you were handling a pull request (PR). You should discuss all the issues you identify in the code and suggest improvements. There is no need to write any code; you will just be talking about the issues. In the system design portion, you will be tasked with designing a system that allows a customer to submit an order to a restaurant. The behavioral questions will primarily focus on your soft skills.