I applied online and had an initial 30-minute phone interview with a person from HR. The interview was pleasant, and we were both happy to continue to the next step, which was a Codility coding test. I took the test on the same day. It consisted of four questions: three problems in a language of my choice and one in SQL. After completing the test, I received a score of 100% and was offered a one-hour technical call with a senior software engineer at the company. I waited another four days until I was in contact with the senior software engineer.

Here is where things took a turn. The interviewer I was speaking with had almost no English. When I was talking to him, I constantly had to ask him to repeat his questions. As he spoke, he made frequent "ehhh" and "emmmm" noises. He took no regard of the coding test I had completed, nor the fact that I got all questions correct. Instead, he asked a lot of weird and unnecessary questions about Java, which most people wouldn't know. Then he went through "typical work scenarios," where he would talk about something that happens at work, such as a bug or problem, and how I would go about fixing it. This is fair enough, except he had almost no English, and I could barely understand or comprehend what he was trying to ask. The constant "emmm" and "ummm" didn't help either.

Needless to say, I didn't perform well at this stage. Instead of telling me that I was unsuccessful, the original HR representative decided not to reply to me at all. I sent an email asking if they would be moving forward with the application, but I received no reply.

Maybe next time, ask a more competent person to perform a technical interview, or at least one who speaks English.

How would you go about doing X?