I applied online. I interviewed at HelloFresh (Berlín) in Apr 2021
Interview
The interview process was a joke. First of all, I applied for the Engineering Manager position, however, HR started interviewing me for the Principal Engineer position. I only noticed this at the end of the first interview. Apparently, they don't read applications or CVs well.
Anyway, I was invited to the technical interview for the Engineering Manager position afterwards.
I supposed to do the interview with two people from the company. An engineer, and a Director. However, the Director didn't show up, so I was alone with an engineer who recently got promoted to the squad-lead position. That was quite disappointing because 1) one-man interviews are usually problematic since you can't rely on a single person judgment 2) you would expect someone with a higher title in the room, especially for management positions and it was missing without no prior notice.
Unfortunately, the interviewer wasn't enough experienced and he gave a negative impression to me about the company. For example, when he mentioned "some EMs are more technical, some aren't", I asked how roles don't conflict with the Principal title. His answer was "we only have 1 principal, we are also still learning about this title" etc.
The whole interview was kind of an infrastructure oriented system design talk, that one can hardly correlate to a people-management position. At the end of the interview, there were only 3 minutes for my questions because the interviewer stuck with event-driven architecture questions.
So it turns out HelloFresh has a huge PHP legacy with no clear architectural pattern. They have been migrating to GoLang but they don't seem to have a structured plan for this. There is a huge title confusion within the company. Some EMs code, some doesn't, and there is the Principal role that they don't know well. The interview process was very amateur for a publicly listed company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Similar to infrastructure-level design systems questions. Lots of event-driven design questions (almost %70 of the interview).
I applied online. I interviewed at HelloFresh in Apr 2020
Interview
Completed application Monday evening. Got an email passing on my application on Friday. Have a decade worth of pertinent experience, live in 1 of the 2 potential base areas, and have an MS in the somewhat obscure field they wanted a BS in plus the specialization they were interested in. Disappointed to not have gotten an HR phone screen but glad to have been informed so quickly.
Initial 30 min phone interview with recruiter, awkward but standard. Invited for in person interview where interviewed with about 6 people who seemed they were being forced to take time away from their busy day to sit in for an interview, and were a bit condescending in their approach. This specific department run by previous Wall St. leads- not a bad thing, but didn't seem open to anyone with a different background. I did not get selected to move forward, but most definitely would not have proceeded regardless. Not an appropriate company fit.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Had different case scenarios on potential challenges and how you'd resolve them