I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Mimecast (London, England) in Jul 2021
Interview
It was going good and them took a nosedive.
1. HR Screening. (They were really helpful and perhaps the only good this about the interview process)
2. Technical Interview - Pairprogramming and solving a problem. It was alright, interviewwers were helpful and guided me in correct direction
3. Technical interview - 2 interviewers supposed to come but only 1 attended and the 2nd guy forgot about it and joined 15 minutes late and tried to take over the interview. I was already answering a question by the 1st guy and we were kind of discussing back and forth on a problem but 2nd interviewer wanted to ask his own questions before our discussion came to an end. That did put me off and it was still okay.
Then 2nd interviewer asked a few basic questons and expected a textbook answer in proper jargon. I was explaining the concept of it and he stopped me to ask I want to know the exact word for it. I realized the tone and no longer wanted to participate in the interview and we closed it shortly after.
Overall, I am happy that I was not selected for the role because I consider myself lucky not to work in an environment where 2 people cant work together for 60minutes.
First round of interview with 2-interviewers.
One asked about Java, Springboot, SOLID design principles, what is Liskov substitution in detail. List concurrent collections in java, name some of the design patterns you used. why singleton where is it used in Java, Spring vs Springboot. which version of java you have worked on, what all new features of java17 you used. which spring, springboot versions you are using. Whats new in these compare to previous versions. How JPA repository internally works and maintains DB connections.
Other asked about AWS - like what all services of AWS you have worked on, How do you write IAM policies, about the syntax and internals, if you are actively working on AWS then only you could answer those questions. This guy was asking exact syntax, field names, where in aws console you configure what kind of questions. type of ec2 instances that can be created in aws, what are all available settings while creating ec2.
All theoretical questions generally asked in service based companies.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Waste of time.
Java and AWS based theoretical questions.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Mimecast (London, England) in Jan 2020
Interview
The role was specifically in their API Team. Here is the whole process -
1. Applied online through StackOverflow.
2. Recruiter wrote me an email with 2 pages of text, explaining about the company. Also, asked me to write answers to 7 questions.
3. I wrote an email with the answers, explaining my profile.
4. Recruiter writes back to me asking "Do you have experience with APIs?". This was quite funny because it was very obvious from my profile.
5. Nevertheless, I wrote him back explaining my experience with APIs.
6. Recruiter wrote back to me saying, "Our Engineers like to know more information".
At this stage, I lost my patience and wrote him back saying I like to withdraw my application. I would suggest people read all the reviews here before thinking of applying there. For me, it seemed like the Recruiter had no idea about any of the tech there and was only asking questions just for the sake of filling in a template :D
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Even after looking at my CV which has all the details about the product that I worked on, how it was built etc., they asked me these -
1. Do you have experience with APIs?
2. "Our Engineers like to know more and I don't tell you what they want to know"