I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at On the Beach (Manchester, England) in Apr 2023
Interview
1st stage: 30 minutes video chat to get to know more about the company and role. The next two stages occurred on the same day. This was a competency interview and a live tech test. The competency interview consisted of two interviewers asking questions from a list. Question topics included agile workflows, challenging experiences, cloud monitoring, refactoring. There were roughly 6+ questions in the 1 hour. The live tech test involved adding some functionality to a React app via Codesandbox, with two developer interviewers watching. The questions were fairly simple. There were some unintended bugs with the project, so I debugged these. I would say that I felt like one of the interviewers was feeding me every line of code when I didn't need them to, which may have made it look like I didn't know how to do it myself. I received a rejection as, apparently, I hadn't hit some of the marks on the competency matrix. This felt a little unforgiving. All developers will have strengths and weaknesses, or areas things they just don't have much experience in. Demonstrating the ability to learn and broader software delivery experience should hold greater importance.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
[Paraphrasing] How have you used monitoring to find and resolve a bug in a piece of software?
Screening call, initial chat with engineering manager, then a paired tech test. I felt all of these stages went well. As other reviews have said, completely ghosted after that with no feedback or rejection email, which was disappointing as seemed like a nice place to work
Thanks for sharing your feedback. It's disappointing to hear that this was your experience - we'll share your comments with our recruitment team for review.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at On the Beach (Manchester, England) in June 2021
Interview
Had a short, 25-minute screener with an engineering manager where we discussed the company and my experience.
The second stage was a remote "strong pairing" exercise, which is a difficult way to write software if you're not used to it but I didn't feel pressured and the discussion of the solution seemed to be as important as the execution.
Finally, the third stage was relatively informal and consisted of a Zoom call with two senior engineers where we discussed a bit more of my experience and I was able to ask about the company, its culture and engineering practice. They came across really frank, honest about their opinion of the company and the benefits, and like they were genuinely trying to get to know me.
All in all, despite the difficult and open-ended tech task, a positive experience.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
General questions about employment history and experience
Thanks so much for your detailed feedback. It goes a long way in helping us improve the interviewing experience for all. Great to have you on the team.