I applied online. I interviewed at Real (New York, NY) in Jan 2021
Interview
First, there is a take home project. If you pass that, you will have a session with an engineer to discuss your project. If you pass that, you'll have another session with a different engineer to talk through java / spring / db fundamentals. then after that I met with the CTO for a culture fit interview, with some technical questions. Then they sent me an offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Know your java / spring / relational db fundamentals
Sent codescreen which is an complete application. I was able to finish and submit in the given time. They never came back, they simply ghosted. Its waste of my time, I would have prepared something better.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Some movie matcher program, Compare data from external providers with internal data.
I applied online. I interviewed at Real in Jul 2024
Interview
As several others already described, their initial step is completion of a coding assignment. Your work is then submitted to what seems like a very nit picky review process.
As a developer with decades of experience, and scoring a perfect 400 on the Sun Certified Java Developer certification, I was quite surprised I didn't pass due to my code being "hard to read".
I added javadoc, named things more descriptively than their provided class name suffixed with "Impl", followed OO design concepts of loose coupling & tight cohesion, commented where appropriate, and implemented factory method and strategy design patterns for ease of extensibility. I also included a readme-like file explaining my design decisions. Given I'm currently employed and could only dedicate so much time to the project, I recognized there were still some short comings and extra features I could have implemented.
None of that though was apparently enough to overcome their very subjective definition of readable code. I'm not above not being selected for a very competitive position, but when I asked for more details on my review, issues with "hard-codings" (yes, plural, from the reviewer) and code readability was all I got...weird.
I do understand that they created the coding assignment tailored to what they're specifically looking for, with requirements vague enough as to not totally give away their passing criteria. But IMHO I'm guessing they're hyper-focusing on aspects that most may not consider important enough to spend the time on.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding assignment to read in data from two different CSV files and implement a provided interface to match records between them. The the provided unit test must pass, and one is encouraged to add more unit test cases.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Real
Interview
Got a call recruiter and explained job description gave good overview of the company/culture. Got coding assessment email, which can be completed within a week. Took few hours to complete. Coding assessment is rated on few different aspects like Code Readability, Structure, Extensibility, Accuracy etc.
After assessment was cleared, couple of technical interviews with Senior engineers. One of them focused on coding assessment review and few technical questions on Java/Concurrency/Spring/JPA/Kafka. Then System Design interview.
Once technical interviews are done got call from recruiter for Manager interview, which was done by CTO. Manager interview focussed behavioral and a design problem. After manager interview, got a call from recruiter with offer.
Overall great interview experience.