TLDR: If your level of professional experience is sufficient, do not waste your time here.
The first interview with a breeze, it was a generic get to know interview. And basically, they explained what is RPA.
Received invitation for second interview + coding assignment, and here is where the fun begins.
First, they completely substituted the interviewers from the first interview. So these new guys had no idea who I was, cue 10 wasted minutes of introductions.
Then comes the coding assignment. This is the assignment (copy-pasted line by line):
Implement a simple User Management and Authentication API. Its requirements are as follows:
• It should be possible to create, read, update and delete users
• A user should have a username and password
• A user should be able to login with a valid username/password combination
• A user should have a role. Only users with a certain role can invoke certain endpoints
Yes, I was asked to do a CRUD on a User object :)
So I hacked the solution in about 15 minutes with commonly available open-source libraries. I was very open as to what I did, and why I did it, as well as clearly indicated what libraries were used.
What I was banking on? The interviewers evaluate the creativity, and approach which is taken to solve an issue with the currently available tools i.e. pretty much act as you would do in your normal workday. Naturally during the interview, I talked about an alternative proper, production-ready, approach that did not rely on Cookie authentication, but rather a token one.
What did they want? To see me write code.
Now would I normally write a review of an interview? No. It was a very visible mismatch between my needs and the company ones. And if it was not for one of the senior manager's telephone call I would have forgotten about these interviews. What was the call about? They would not processed with me - the primary reason, needed to write code in the coding assignment.