The first stage interview was a 30-minute chat with a recruiter. They asked me about my experience and then some technical questions around DB transactions, microservices patterns, and Java concurrency.

The next stage was a 1-hour live coding exercise (not LeetCode or HackerRank type questions), but you have to be very fast. It was split into about 15 minutes to talk and ensure understanding of the requirements, followed by 45 minutes to code a service. The exercise is very easy, in my opinion, even for a non-senior engineer.

However, they sent the requirements over the chat window, and here is where the fun part begins.

The text of the exercise came deliberately confusing and talked about requirements that you would not need to implement. You have to spend time talking with the interviewer about what you will need to include and what not.

I asked, "Do I need to implement feature A?" They responded, "No, you don't need that." I then inquired, "Okay, and what about feature B that is described in the text?" The reply was, "No, you can ignore that."

On top of that, in whatever time you have left to go all guns blazing and start coding, the interviewer interrupts you and questions your decisions. You have to stop and justify them. By the end, you need to have a pretty much exhaustive set of unit tests for a maintainable and extensible solution.

All in all, the exercise is pretty easy, but it seems they value "machine gun" type coders a lot.

The interviewer also told me they are dealing with a lot of concurrency issues, which is no wonder if they expect you to code so fast.

I would have to say that the interviewers are polite but not very experienced for this type of coding exercise.

Implement a load balancer service.