J-Labs interview questions

4 rounds 1. HR 2. Technical interview with some basic technical questions and some open questions about scaling. 3. Talk with Manager 4. Technical interview with client - live coding

The first step of the interview is an online test on devskiller platform checking some basic knowledge of java and related technologies (SQL, multithreading, collections API etc). There are no prepared answers to choose from; there is code you need to fill gaps in. Thus it is required to memorize java API pretty decently - probably authors forgot nowadays people use IDE to write code. The second part are small projects in spring/spring boot. Your job is to implement some simple business logic missing and write unit tests. Online platform and editor is very poor and they require you to download the source code and do the task on your local computer. Then you commit it to the git repository. The first project was a service to implement post and comments relationships. It was a typical project with spring repository, service, controller. Almost no business logic, just crud (saving and reading entities) The code provided was very poor quality, ex return optional.orElse(null); unit tests were also poorly written/designed: every layer has mocked all the dependencies on other layers even there was very little logic to test. Also there was mongodb used as a storage - there was not such a requirement in the job offer nor I put it in my CV. I had 30 minutes to do this task. The second task was to read an article and implement some missing logic according to this article. This time the given project required a gradle plugin installed on my computer - again I didn't receive such information from the recruiter, it was not in the job offer either. After installing gradle on my local machine it turned out there was an error when building the project and I was unable to proceed with the task. To sum up: It seems the recruiter didn't read my CV or it was ignored/not understood. Furthermore the prerequisites for the coding tasks were not specified carefully: they required mongodb and gradle knowledge to solve the tasks even it wasn't clearly mentioned before. Also the devskiller platform is a big disappointment: they don't check your coding skills, probably not even knowledge or problem solving skills, they check if you know by heart java API or if you can learn mongodb/gradle/ in a few minutes.