SO1 Interview Questions

Application

The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at SO1 (Berlin (Germany)) in October 2018.

Interview

They approached by talent resource system, and after I accepted they want me to finish 1st Codility challenge, which took 2 hours to finish.
After that they asked me again to finish another round of coding challenge, making a simple bid tracking system, and they gave me 2 days to finish it.
After another 2 weeks later they asked me to join the technical interview.
The interviewers are asking a lot of questions, both technical things and personal organization things. (e.g. how you solve the disagreement between your team member, imagine microservices are stateful, what if one of transaction is failed then what you should do)
After another 3 weeks, they told me they want to proceed with CEO, Raimund, and he also asked my motivation behind, and how to calculate total weight of supermarket.
And after one week later they told me they will proceed with another candidate which more suits for them.
If you can endure 3~4 months taking interview process and getting some weird feedback not helpful after all, why don't you try here?

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at SO1 (Berlin (Germany)).

Interview

HR contacted one day after the application. Classical HR Interview. (What do you know about the company, expectations, etc.) Then, there was a coding test on Codility, consisting of 1 SQL question regarding window function use, and two data structure problems which needed to be coded, one done with Greedy Algorithm and the other like Bubble Sort.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took a week. I interviewed at SO1 (Warsaw (Poland)) in December 2015.

Interview

I found the ad on the website (job portal), send the application. After few days I receive an email with an invitation for an interview. The interview was really nice and friendly, I talked with the previous Office Manager, she describe me the company, told me how it works and what my responsibilities would be, then there was a quick talk with the Director chceking my language knowledge, and it was it.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at SO1 (Warsaw (Poland)) in May 2015.

Interview

1. Initial email contact via Recruiterbox, there was a 'homework' task to solve at home to show programming skills.
2. Video Interview - some technical tasks, lot of questions
3. On-site 1 day of work - we checked if we like to work together, solve a task together.
4. Final meeting with CEO before signing the contract.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at SO1 in February 2018.

Interview

Applied via a recruiting company so a ton of HR overhead was added. They moved very slow with the application process, took about 5 weeks. The technical discussions and trial day were very interesting, a real pleasure to discuss with the engineers.

In the end, I was rejected because I was "not senior enough". Why was it necessary to carry a candidate through 4 interviews in 5 weeks just to reject him at the end for not being "senior" enough ? Is that hard to calculate the years of experience from the resume ?

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at SO1 (Berlin (Germany)).

Interview

Email
Telephone interview
Face to face interview with the team
Face to face with the CEO
Nice office, friendly team, great structured interview, rather short interview.
But you should be really well prepared. Read and watch everything you will find.

Interview Questions

Negotiation

Email, phone talks
nice and polite

Application

I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at SO1 (Berlin (Germany)) in December 2018.

Interview

1st round: non-technical phone interview.
This consists on a 20min Skype chat with HR; nothing technical, general questions about personality, and what So1 does.

2nd round: home assignment
I received a home assignment on predicting customer behavior. One part is on theoretical questions regarding mathematical functions relevant to the use case, while the other part is a coding assignment. You have 5-7 days to return your solution.

HR said that it should take 8 hours; in my case that was completely unrealistic; at least 25 hours were needed to finish the task (note: I have 3 years experience, and later received an offer from a Fortune500 company).
I think it is not fair that they ask such a big commitment to candidates (working 4 days for free!) for the home assignment; this seems a strategy to have "consulting work" for free.

After HR receive the solution, they forward it to the Software engineering/Machine learning team. Then than decide if they want to schedule a remote technical interview. If you pass that, you will have an half-a-day onsite.

I did not pass the home assignment task.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at SO1 (Berlin (Germany)) in January 2019.

Interview

An interview was with the junior HR, who did not know much about tech stack or company.
To get introduced to tech team I had to complete technical exercise in 24 hours since dispatch time.
Exercise was fairly easy:
1. Create Nagios check for Kafka or Elasticsearch
2. Create simple Kubernetes and answer few questions.
I've completed and sent back results in requested 24 hours and then....
There was no confirmation that someone actually received exercise. Only when I've asked, they replied.
Then was complete silence for 2 weeks. Even after my follow up email there was no reply from SO1 side at all.
Finally recruiter called me and notified that Lead position is closed, however, they have Senior position still open.

Suggestion - don't put inexperience HR who ruin whole process and impression. Don't create workflow, where you put technical exercise on the very first step, and then lag with checking results. Anf finally, allowing people to get introduced to company tech stack and make decision - would they be interested to work in such a company.

Interview Questions