Absolutely unprofessional. The interviewer reused a meeting invite. This meant that when I joined a minute early to sort out my camera and microphone, I interrupted a previous candidate.

The meeting was touted to be 'a chat to discuss the opportunity,' but a technical screen was sprung upon me by the HR person.

The interview concluded with the interviewer telling me that they could pass me on to the next stage, but that I should be brushing up on my Java if I want to pass.

This is an interview for a job ad that claims, "Most of our code is in Java, but we're pragmatic - we'll use whatever makes the most sense to complete a task (previous experience with other languages is great!)"

It seems that Canva is looking for a very specific kind of engineer, which is fair enough. I'm not that engineer, which is fair enough too.

I was asked highly Java-specific questions that were likely read off a list.

When asked about threading and how I would manage multiple threads using the same resource, I gave the answer of either an atomic or a mutex. The atomic answer was 'acceptable,' but the mutex answer was not, as the correct answer was to use an intrinsic lock. 🤔

Then I was given a list of five functions and asked to describe what they were doing. I answered all of them correctly, but the interviewer was apparently unimpressed that I relied on my software engineering fundamentals instead of specific Java knowledge.