I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Ion Asset Architecture (London, England) in Dec 2024
Interview
I ran very late to my interview due to the winter chaos. But the company seemed totally fine with that and made me feel right at home. I was offered some hot chocolate and biscuits to warm up and we got started.
There was quite a bit of digging around my CV. It wasn't really so much questions about what I did in reach role but more "meta questions" about why I decided to go down a certain path. That indicated to me that these guys/girls know what they are looking for.
The technical part was just that. Technical. Not unreasonably so, like there were no crazy questions, but they were not easy. For example, I worked a lot with Oracle DB in the past and so there were a lot of Oracle specific questions (like creating tree structures in Oracle for example). This part took about 50 minutes. What was good then when I got stuck I was allowed to try to reason about it and explain my thought process, which means I'm not just required to reel off memorised facts.
At the end I got to ask questions. My questions mostly revolved around toolchains, CI/CD setup, policies, rough overview of teams etc.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you create a hierarchical relationship between rows?
The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Ion Asset Architecture (London, England) in Nov 2023
Interview
I interviewed at the office in London. Because I can't leave work during the day they were flexible enough to interview me after hour. It seemed like the office was still quite busy at that point still but I now understand it's a round-the-world operation with something always happening in some time zone.
The interviewer thoroughly went through my CV. I got the impression that she was actually interested in my education and what I had learned. Not my usual experience. I have only a few years out of university. But one thing I found different that she asked a number of questions what I actually want to do - that I have not heard before. I had to think hard and quick on this one.
Then came the technical questions --- which was kind of humbling. I'm not sure how I flunked some of the basics in hindsight, but I guess I blanked out on a few basic C# and comp sci questions. Not impressed with my own performance in the first part. That was okay though, as my interviewer seemed understanding. It wasn't a problem, and we moved on to questions about writing some methods in C# and then iterated over them. Some of these methods got really optimised, I found it interesting how much code we managed to strip away.
Finally I got to ask questions of my own, which was of course interesting, but it's really more just questions that I personally wanted to know --- I don't think that would be of interest to anyone else.
Oh and they got me an Uber to go home because it was late in the evening and I have a long-ish, inconvenient trip home. That was class (not a class in the programming sense, hihi)
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Ion Asset Architecture (London, England) in Oct 2023
Interview
I went through three rounds of interviews with three different people that were all technical in nature. Really liked the offices, they were well lit and there were lots of huge Lego models on display (some of which I had never heard of or seen before). The meeting room was allowing me to see the rest of the offices a little which was cool, e.g. I was just not in a room with four walls which is what a lot of interview rooms are like. The interviewers were patient and walked me through questions that were drawn from subjects, tools and technologies that I had on my CV. They would ask how much experience I actually had with this (We tend to sometimes make out we know a little more about a technology than we actually do, don't we). If I admitted that I had used it in the past but wasn't really very familiar with it, then they didn't ask me any questions about this. I thought this was good. I got two quite basic questions embarassingly wrong (when I looked up the details later) but I wasn't made to feel that that was a problem. They said I could bring some of my own work to the interview, so I got to demonstrate a smartphone app (iOS) that I had built. It was pretty basic, but all three interviewers were interested to hear about it and see it. So that's nice. I think for this role I need a little bit more experience, I have 4 years experience and because I work in a bank I don't really get to work on the latest and greatest stacks. I was told I would be welcome to re-apply in a few years again, which I believe I will take them up on.