Just got to the screening and didn’t make it past there.
A USAA recruiter reached out to me to schedule a screening. Below is the convo.
Recruiter: “it sounds like you’re in your car. I’m concerned for your safety. Can we reschedule?”
Me: “I’m safe and I’m hands free, but if you need to reschedule we can”
Her: “so the requirement is 6 years of professional experience and I noticed that your time in the army isn’t software engineering so we won’t count that towards your experience” (the proud military company won’t count my military experience)
Me: “Well I do have well over the required minimum software Engineer experience.”
Her: “I would like to count it with you just to be sure”
At this point I’m wondering why she reached out to me in the first place other than to waste my time if she really believed I wasn’t qualified. My resume shows that I do meet that requirement though. Even after counting she doubted my experience.
She said “ok, I see you have experience with Kubernetes, but do you have experience with containers? I don’t see that on your resume.”
I said “I have Docker on my resume as well as several ways I’ve used it”
She said “I’m not sure what that is”
I said “that’s the container experience you were looking for”
She said “well let’s talk about salary requirements. The average offer for this position is about $145k. Does that work for you?”
I said “well can I ask you what the pay band is?”
She said “well it was listed on the posting $130k-$195”
I said “well I was looking for something around $175k - $180k”
She said “well that’s way too high for this position”
I said “ummm, isn’t that within the pay band listed on your posting?”
She said “well you’re getting a little disrespectful so we’re just going to go ahead and end this”
I said “uhhhh ok buh bye.”
If you are a skilled software engineer, there are tons of BIG red flags between my experience and every other review on Glassdoor. Good luck friends.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at USAA (San Antonio, TX) in July 2021
Interview
After the HR interview, I've been called to another meeting with the manager, the architect, and two other engineers. I was asked a few not so hard questions about Java, and then started the live coding session, with pair programming. In this session I was supposed to call the actions to one of the engineers, and she would implement them. I was advised to use TDD, implement new tests for the proposed problem, fix the existent ones (if necessary), and explain what I was doing, and why.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the difference between a Set and a List in Java?
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at USAA (Plano, TX) in May 2018
Interview
~4 hours. Starts with a review of practices, then a group session where you work in "scrum-like" fashion with other candidates, then a breakout session where you whiteboard and code to fix unit tests with an Eclipse IDE
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you design an app and database for a Vet Office?