I applied through an agency.

The first stage interview was organized pretty quickly. It was over the phone, and it was easy – just some very basic Java questions and very, very basic competency-based stuff.

The second round was a take-home exercise about implementing a RESTful API for some problem. The given time was way too short to give them a fully implemented and tested solution. Or maybe the agent rushed it; I have no idea. So, whoever takes this test, identify the most important functions and implement those. The documentation of the implemented API seemed more important than the code itself.

The third round was an on-site, three-hour, face-to-face interview with multiple people: devs, a hiring manager, and a product manager. They had questions about how I implemented the take-home test, what the main design decisions were behind that, and why I wrote certain things. It looked like they didn't really understand the reactive programming model, because I faced questions that might have arisen because of that, or they just wanted to make sure that I understood it. So, using the "plain old" Spring MVC may land you the job, but I wanted to expose what I think about the future of REST. WebFlux was clearly not of their interest, especially not when combined with routing techniques using a RouteLocator bean. So, no new things; use legacy tech if you want the job!

There was also a coding exercise during the face-to-face. I failed that because I totally froze when four people were watching me (and basically the whole office could do that, because it was projected onto a big screen). Yes, that was my problem; it was my fault. I must admit that. But according to the agent, that wasn't the reason why they rejected my application. The agent said I didn't seem passionate. What is more passionate about Java development than having your own home project, contributing to open-source projects, and answering Java questions on popular sites? How can anyone be more passionate? I did not get a response from the agent for this question. And on top of that, it is not a valid reason behind technology choices to do something with the most modern stuff because you think that is the future and we should move away from legacy techniques. Which are working, that's true, but there are better solutions on the market.

Basic Java questions

and questions on the take-home test