First interview with HR.
Second interview was a live coding challenge, that was really disappointing. Some considerations here:
- They ask you to build a load balancer, and I was aware of it in advance, so I was able to properly prepare for the interview, even I coded it before interview to practice.
- You have around 40 minutes of effective time for coding.
- I had issues with my IDE as I installed it from scratch (IntelliJ) and by default there's some AI for autocomplete that the guy asked me to remove. After removing the plugins (there are a couple), the IntelliJ was crashing and 5-10 minutes were gone.
- I approached the solution with TDD in a simple and elegant way. They ask as a first task to create a load balancer with a limit of 10 servers and not allowing creating duplicates. All good until here. Second task is to assign randomly one of the servers from the list. And here they expect to use the random (in that case Random from Kotlin) that I barely used it in the past and wasn't able to remember how it worked. As you're not allowed to use any autocomplete or search on the internet, you need to know and remember how Random works. Also to be able to test properly the server assigned, you need to mock the random behaviour (in Kotlin Random is an abstract class). I told to the guy that this wasn't a good approach, as I need to manually inject the random in production sources just because of the test. Also I'm heavily against using mocks and so on. But looks like they are from that old-school style of SOLID everywhere, so they expect you to create your own implementation of Random and inject it to be able to test it.
- Because of this back and forth about the Random stuff, I ran out of time (and they expect to finish this second step to be able to move forward to the next stage).
- The guy of the interview was rude and 0 emphatic, he was just a guy there on the background barely speaking and 10 minutes before ending the interview he said "You ran out of time already"
- My feedback is totally aligned with lots of other feedbacks I read in Glassdoor about Revolut interview, so I have the feeling that I'm one more who threw away his time. I ended up with a really bad impression about their interviewing process.
I have to say that HR interview was really good and the guy was really kind.
