Mar 30, 2015
Software Dev Engineer II Interview
Anonymous Employee in Rome
No Offer
Negative Experience
Average Interview
Application
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Venere.com (Rome)
Interview
The interview process was composed by two initial Skype Interviews.

The first was about candidate's experience, wishes and reasons to move to Venere.com.
The second one has some generic technical questions, very easy ones.

After that, they scheduled a "one day interviews loop" composed by seven different steps with different people as well:

- Inteview with Director
It was just a chat during which he talked about the acquisitions and directions the company undegoes (from Expedia up to hotels.com). Apparently Venere.com seemed very far from Expedia standards.

- Manager QA
It was a chat in which the QA gave to me some scenarios. Nothing hard nor technical.

- Dev Engineers
They gave to me some programming questions/exercises on Java and SQL and a Computer Science Quiz. Apart from some tricky Java exercises it was very easy. The interviewers then asked about frameworks like Spring and Hibernate like ORM engines but with very general questions. No one question on data structures and algorithms (a bit disappointing).

- Technical Product Manager
It was like a friends chat.

- Scrum Master
It was a funny chat with some scenarios to deal with.

- Programming exercises
Two old engineers gave to me a problem on path to solve in Java in 30 minutes. They gave to me a book on Java grammar and an A4 blank sheet. After 10 minutes I gave to them the written solution. It was perfect and they were happy. After that they asked to me some simple questions on JAX WS and REST. When I talked with them about other approaches (JEE EJB - MDB) the interviewers said to me that they didn't know that kind of architecture :(.
No one question on data structures and algorithms. Very disappointing.

The interview process went very well, but the job required about 6 years of experience. After a week they sent to me an email saying that they preferred to hire another candidate because he had more than 6 years of experience and matched the requirements.

In general for top companies candidates are hired beyond their experience.
Interview
What about Spring?
1 Answers