Lineup Systems interview questions

It's worth noting that this paragraph is an edit, just to say that my experiences overall echo the other dev-based interview on here, which I wish I'd read before I bothered with the whole ordeal. Three parts. Firstly a chat with a lead dev + CIO for an hour. This was fine. Fairly lengthy coding test for the second part, a mixture of C# & SQL. Once again this was fine, if not a little lengthy and frustrating (cannot use external libraries which made a two-minute task take considerably longer). Final round was another hour interview, covering some technical questions and a live SQL coding challenge with the head of software dev. The final stage is where the wheels came off for both them and me. The connection was so bad on Zoom, which got blamed on me, until it got so bad he got chucked off, and admitted the vpn his side had also gone... Had to answer questions in this environment, hearing about 50% of what was being asked between freezing webcams and jumbled sound. Eventually we gave up, and carried on the next day. The live SQL challenge was a bloodbath. I had to take control over Zoom, and RDC into another computer from his, which meant each character took over a second to appear on screen. I got questioned on my touch typing ability whilst this was going on. I also couldn’t use any special characters due to the keyboard layout on his computer, which meant I had to ask for !”£$%^&*() to be typed for me every time. It was a shambles. The interview was like being hit with a blunt object repeatedly and was ended in about three seconds. Naturally, I didn’t get the job. As expected I had to chase the recruiter myself over two weeks after the final interview. To his defence, he gave me a cookie-cutter response which is more than you get from most. Wouldn’t have accepted the job either way, but it’s a shame the last stage was such a farce.

I have never been so excited about an interview before, and I've been through quite a few lately. The idea of working for an international company excites me quite a bit for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, this one went exactly the opposite of how I had hoped. Let's start with the fact that I was never given a job description, and never told any details about what we'd be doing in the interview, especially having to have certain tools for remote connection. The recruiter wasn't aware it was to be a full 2-hour interview. I was just told they want someone who has C#, .Net Core and SQL, and nice to have Blazor experience. Also told some other basics about the flexibility they needed in the person they were looking for, such as the ability to line up with Czech time for the first few weeks, or even travel there. Cool with me since I love Czechia and even speak a little bit of Czech. I had a really great conversation with both Michael, the CEO, and Jikra, who seems to be Michael's right-hand man when it comes to development. We had a great time until it came to the point where I was to do some SQL queries for them over a remote connection. I wasn't made aware this would be a thing, but no big deal. I know SQL well. So I remote into their machine and start writing some queries. Looking at their temporary database, it was really strange. Their schema was littered with column and table names with underscores. I stopped using underscores 20 years ago in field names, as it doesn't fit any naming conventions in coding with C#, Javascript, PHP, C, or any other language I've ever used, especially when designing a database using a code-first technique. Even Microsoft recommends never using underscores in column or table names because pascal and camel casing makes them unnecessary. They are to be used in index and foreign key names to separate table names from column names. The connection is very slow since the remote computer is in Czechia. It's on a mac so literally NONE of the shortcuts for cursor movement would work. Shift, ctrl, alt, home, end, etc. It's not SQL Server Management Studio or Visual Studio so everything is strange. I start typing and immediately I'm being critiqued on my typing. "You've got a typo". "Do you know how to touch-type?" "No, that's wrong". I feel my heart racing. I'm sweating. Every keystroke becomes embarrassing because I'm doing it wrong. This program matches parentheses in a strange way, so some of my pre-typed ones are disappearing, unlike SSMS, causing me to have to re-read every little bit and see why I was missing some parentheses. The connection was agonizingly slow, meaning I'd type several characters, and it'd be 2-3 seconds before they'd show up. Backspacing took time. Had to use the mouse to select text. Couldn't even copy/paste with ctrl+c and ctrl+v. Using their browser for looking stuff up made things worse. I suddenly felt like looking at stackoverflow made me a bad developer, despite that being the life of a developer. I complete the first one, and am given another and another. I couldn't complete the last one despite getting very close. I really wish I could have done them locally in order to move more quickly and change something small, run the query, examine the result, then make changes. "Now you're just overcomplicating it", he says as I'm typing, which I already knew. It ended with "ok, I've seen enough", and that was basically the end of the interview. No opportunity to ask any additional questions. That was just the end. I don't remember a time when I was made to feel like such a moron. I really don't think they were trying to make me feel stupid on purpose. It was just lack of understanding what I was seeing from my end, and questions about a poorly designed database schema I've never seen before. I've never been so embarrassed in my 42 years of life. I sent a thank you email afterwards, despite how I was feeling. Never heard back from them. Not even from the recruiter. Essentially I've been ghosted, which I find rather unprofessional.