3 stage interview starting with a phone call with a HR member. Stage 2 was a teams interview with 2 senior staff members. Finally a live code test refactoring some legacy JavaScript into 'better' code. Given 45mins for the test then a 15 min review.

The interview process consisted of three interviews: a general chat with a senior engineer and a less experienced one, a behavioural interview with two engineers and a pair programming one. The first interview was overall good. I was joined by a lead engineer and a less experienced engineer. The lead engineer asked miscellaneous questions regarding software practices, work culture, and behavior. The experience was overwhelmingly positive, and they were very quick to reply with a second interview request. The second interview mainly consisted of behavioral questions in the context of working for a large company. Overall, they asked textbook questions such as "what would you do in X situation?". Unfortunately, some questions were asked multiple times (worded differently), making me wonder how prepared the interviewers were. In addition, a few technical questions were asked. In my opinion, some of the answers the interviewers were looking for were not correct, nor did they represent good practices in software engineering. For example, one of the devs made the statement "there are patterns which always make solutions better" - referring to design patterns. I felt they were looking for an agreement on this statement, but unfortunately, the statement isn't always true. In this particular case, design patterns can make a solution more maintainable, but without proper solution refactoring and analysis of the architecture, they can be used in the wrong way and actually make your product unmaintainable. There were more examples of questions that made no sense in a good, modern software engineering context. Overall making me wonder how experienced the interviewers were, and whether Coop promotes self-learning to its employees. Feedback was not given following the second interview, even after emailing their resource managers. It's the first interview where no feedback was given after a fairly long interview, which is the least they could do after a candidate books some time off for the occasion. Again, this makes me wonder how suitable the developers were for interviewing candidates, and how experienced they were at it.