The phone interview lasted for about 30 minutes. I was asked to tell RIM what it was I was working on and how it could be related to what they are doing. A few trivial questions about types of EJBs and Java Collections, Synchronization and concurrent access.
The face-to-face interview took about 2 hours.
I was given a choice of my assignment: design 1 of 3 programs from the list. My choice was to design 'Flight and Hotel booking web app'
Even though the assignment stated that I need to focus on the design stages and capture business requirements and functional specifications the main focus was on entities and their relationships.
As the assignment stated I was free to make any reasonable assumptions as to 3rd party systems and interfacing into them. Again, the developers where predetermined to hear just one scenario that in their minds was the only possible solution. My guess - they simply made up their mind in the first 30 seconds.
Which actually brings a very good point - you have 30 seconds to make the first impression and that's when the decision is made. The rest is less important.
After presenting a cloud type design for my solution I noticed that the interviewers got anxious to get it over with and became very impatient about pretty much everything. At some point they even decided to argue about impossibility to persist Java collections. Not sure what the process at RIM is but when such developers run the show no wonder RIM is not doing well. I guess, weak developers are part of the problem.
Focus on entities and persistence, and make sure you tell them to persist everything locally. And forget about offering them web service interfaces into flight and hotel searching and payment systems. They believe that persisting everything locally is the only way things should work.
You may want think about your web page navigation logic and JSP interaction with stateless EJBs and how they retrieve entity beans or persist them. Choice of persistence provider and db engine is irrelevant.
If, in the end, they take you out through a fire exit door - your chances of getting a job with RIM are 0.
RIM developers lack social skill. Maybe they are so high up in the sky because they work for RIM - who knows.
This interview description is subjective and obviously your personal experience may vary.
Good luck in your job hunt!
