Avature

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Avature (Madrid (Spain)) in March 2018.

Interview

The process began with a personal interview with a person from the People team. She was very kind and did a great job making me feeling comfortable. The duration of the interview was quite long (around 2 hours) but very interesting in terms of the given information and the questions she made, with time to speak about myself.

After this 1:1 I was asked to solve, at home, a technical exercise using an online platform called Codility. The platform works very well in terms of stability and features, but I think that it is too much for an interview. The platform measures EVERYTHING, even in which second you change something, if you are in the Codility tab or have changed to another, when you test your solution, when you submit it, etc. It puts a lot of pressure on you knowing that everything about how you code is being measured. I suppose that it was also recorded.

Apart from that, the exercise consisted of 3 tasks, each one slightly more difficult than the previous one. They were programming exercises related with algorithms and data structures, with a limit time of 2,5 hours to solve all three. It wasn't my best shot but I think that I solved correctly 2 of the 3 tasks, leaving the more difficult blank because I was out of time.

I submitted the exercise and the day after I was communicated that I did not continue in the process, with no information about why. It was kind of disappointed as I thought it was good enough to deserve a defense call or meeting, but I didn't have opportunity to explain why I solved the problems that way or what I felt during the test.

I wrote back, very politely, asking for more information regarding why I failed so miserably, with silence in return.

I think that the technical process of Avature Madrid is broken, and they have to polish a couple of things:

1) Having that the 1:1 with the People person was OK, with a lot of info and care with the candidate, I thought it will be the same if the process was not successful. Candidates deserve to know its errors and why they failed, or why they did not fit the position.

2) Doing a programming test without a technical 1:1 is not enough to screen a candidate, and the same the other way around. Both things could give a lot of information about a person technical background, when only one could give false positives or negatives.

3) Codility test was too much, puts a lot of pressure over the candidate, raising the nervous state to the max, avoiding a relaxed situation in which you can think and achieve the best solution. I think these kind of tests are obsolete, they are very prone to false negatives and positives, and a technical 1:1 with questions and debate plus a programming test with no time pressure nor this NSA-like surveillance is more accurate in order to measure a candidate knowledge. But, obviously, is easier to check the results from the platform than review carefully the code written individually, looking for something aside from the correctness of the solution.