I applied online. I interviewed at TNG Technology Consulting
Interview
The interview process was good. There are 3 slots in total. The first slot is about past experience in the industry. The other two are technical. My experience in programming was not enough and I did not receive an offer. You have to be technically really well prepared to get an offer. It is nice that you get direct feedback at the end. What made the interview a negative experience for me was a rude, racist comment at the end: "Wir in deutschland sind sehr anspruchsvoll". What does that even mean? That I come from a country with lower standards? That was completely inappropriate and unnecessary.
I applied through other source. I interviewed at TNG Technology Consulting
Interview
The interview was overall a positive experience, although I was not offered a position in the end. It was argued that it simply was not enough this time, asking to further specify this, they referred to a lack of direct interaction during the problem solving part.
The problems they pose are somehow examples where agile techniques or at least the spirit behind this can be applied: This means the problems are hard to solve at first sight but in small steps and interacting with the team they become solvable. During this process they want to be actively involved in the discussion by the candidate.
The interview (which I describe below) was as I expected and as described in some other comments here: 4 Parts with 10 minute breaks in between.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
We started with a short walk through the site with a recruiter from TNG. The formal interview started in a separate room with two additional interviewers. Both were TNG employees which entered the company only one or two years ago. That made a discussion on almost the same level possible. I believe this is a very nice setting for an interview. Everybody was very friendly.
They introduced themselves, then I introduced myself. They asked some additional questions regarding my CV. In particular, about my first contact with programming and how I used different programming languages in the past, and how I verified that the coding I did for my scientific work was correct (I did not use unit tests as in industrial software development, I compared my scientific code to analytic results). Technical questions followed: comparing Python and C++ and a discussion about different programming paradigms. Questions were approximately the following:
What is the difference between a compiled and an interpreted language? What is object oriented programming? How does one write a class in Python? What is a python initializer?
A break followed. Then there was a programming example about the possibilities to walk up some stairs with N steps using only increments of two or one steps at a time.
(needs to be solved recursively a[n]=a[n-1]+a[n-2] which is O(n). I suggested a combinatoric solution which solved the problem but was not really welcome and I got their help for the recursive solution.) I was finally asked to write the recursive solution in Python code, which was straight forward.
After a break they posed a surprising problem, "the seven planet problem", which I just found on the internet: "https://boingboing.net/2018/03/05/can-you-solve-the-seven-planet.html".
Also here they helped me to arrive at the solution. Overall I think that it is definitely possible to adapt to the problems and to use their help to solve them in an "agile" fashion so that they will offer the position in the end.
In my case it was not enough, which they told me directly after the interview. They stressed that they were happy that I asked many questions about the company and mentioned to be convinced by the presentation of my scientific work in the past years, as well as my appearance in conversation.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at TNG Technology Consulting
Interview
Insgesamt war der Bewerbhngsprozess sehr fair, freundlich und gut kommuniziert. Erster Kontakt lief über einen Recruiter über LinkedIn, worauf sich relativ schnell ein Vorstellungsgespräch vor Ort ergeben hat. Dort haben sich insgesamt 5 Mitarbeiter (2x HR, 3x IT Consultants) einen Vormittag Zeit genommen. Positiv war, dass dir Entscheidung noch vor Ort direkt nach dem Gespräch mitgeteilt wird.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Detailiertes Durchsprechen des Lebenslaufs & bisheriger Coding Erfahrung und vorherigen technischen Projekten.
