This story is a bit long, but I feel compelled to share it.

I applied for a position at King, not actively seeking a new role, but the company had always seemed interesting from the outside. I was contacted promptly by a recruiter and had a pleasant, standard first interview. Afterward, I had to reach out to the recruiter to inquire about the next stage.

They wanted to proceed, which involved speaking with the developers. I received an invitation for this from a different recruiter, which was confusing.

During this interview, they asked technical questions, presented scenarios, and we had a discussion. It was a good technical interview, and I had no real complaints. Following this, another recruiter contacted me to relay that the developers were happy and wished to move forward. It's worth noting that I had spoken to three different recruiters by this point and had no clear idea who was managing my application.

The next stage involved a small coding assignment, which was straightforward and not overly complicated. There were constraints: no external frameworks were allowed, and I had to use an extremely outdated HTTP server (Sonarlint flagged many issues). Despite this, I completed and submitted it to one of the recruiters. I received no confirmation of receipt.

After waiting a few days with no response, I eventually lost patience and inquired if they had received it. They confirmed they had and had already reviewed it. The lack of confirmation for my submission, coupled with having to chase them for the results, struck me as quite unusual and, frankly, unacceptable behavior.

They ultimately decided not to proceed, citing problems with my code. I have no personal pride attached to my code, as any competent developer shouldn't. However, their feedback suggested a preference for a very specific coding style, criticizing "clean code" issues otherwise. I have extensive experience writing enterprise-level Java code and have learned from some of the best in the industry, largely adopting their coding practices. Their criticism of "clean code" feels more like a bias towards their preferred style rather than adherence to actual guidelines.

Furthermore, it took them a "long time" to understand parts of the code. This suggests to me that the review was conducted by less experienced individuals. Given the simplicity of the task and the small size of the application, and considering they likely see this task solved numerous times, I can't imagine an experienced reviewer taking more than ten minutes to grasp the entire code. My suspicion is that my use of modern Java features might have confused them, but this is just speculation. I would have appreciated the opportunity to discuss the feedback directly with the developers who reviewed my code to understand how I could improve. However, receiving feedback filtered through a non-technical recruiter who was unable to respond proactively to emails was both frustrating and, at times, felt insulting.

Overall, my experience was quite negative. While the interviews themselves were fine, the coordination issues with three different recruiters, the lack of basic email responsiveness, and the vague feedback on the technical assignment have made King a company I will not consider in the future.

I have requested further elaboration on the identified issues from the recruiter, though I do not expect a reply. While they are not obligated to respond after the process has concluded on their end, it would have been appreciated. However, this process has clearly demonstrated that effective communication is not their forte, so I cannot expect courtesy when even the bare minimum is not met.

Basic Java questions, focusing on concurrency and data structures.