First contact was from email and a call with the HR for initial informations and doubts about the process and then the second call that I had was with an engineer for the code test.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Zalando (Berlin) in Mar 2021
Interview
- first part was a HR call - all good
- second was a codility test - I waited for the weekend to do the test and before that I received an e-mail from a different recruiter than the one I was talking to initially asking me why I didn't finish it yet. It surprised me, because I already discussed this with my recruiter. Seems weird that the recruiters don't know about each other's actions. The codility challenge itself was fine, not very difficult.
- the next interview was a technical one, it was rescheduled once, and the second time the recruiter that was supposed to be there wasn't there, so they sent someone else. I'm guessing they didn't want to reschedule second time. It went fine, the questions were very general, about the way I work in my current position etc. Also at the end we tried to improve my codility solution.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- how is your team organised?
- what do you know about parallel programming?
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Zalando (Dortmund) in Oct 2019
Interview
The process took 2 months. First I was given a programming test followed by an HR interview, later a live coding round with an engineering lead which went quite well.
In the Final round, there were back to back 3 interviews each of 1 hour in which first interview was taken by a Senior QA Lead with 0 technical questions, next one was a system design interview where I was given a problem to design a system related to Payment Gateway by a senior zalando engineer, in the last one I was asked to improve the solutions I submitted in the first round along with few javascript questions like - Difference between es5 and es6 this, why is nodejs asynchronous, what is callback hell.
Both technical interviews went quite well overall it was a very good experience, but I was vetoed by the QA Lead who never really asked me a single 'development' level question but all either culture or team-bonding related questions (like what would you do when a fellow developer interrupts you during your group discussions etc.). I can't quite understand why did they assign a testing executive to interview a backend developer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is callback hell ?
What is the difference between es5 and es6 this keyword ?