The interview process had some good and bad parts. I would say from the start that I didn't get an offer.

The discussion with the recruiter was really nice and productive. She asked me a few things about myself and my experience (including some small technical questions) and then told me more about Revolut and their way of doing things. I kind of felt like it would be a good fit for me.

After a few days, I had the live coding challenge, and that went well. I was asked to implement three easy tasks, one depending on another. The only observation I would have here is the fact that the interviewer had a strange English accent, and a few times I had to ask him to repeat his question. All in all, he was a nice guy, giving me a lot of information about Revolut and how they work.

Then I moved to the third and last stage, for me. Here, everything was different than the previous interactions. Two guys interviewed me (although only one was actively questioning; the other seemed to be busy with other things). Right from the beginning, I felt like he was rushing to the finish. He asked me to introduce myself, and after I said a few words, he interrupted me, saying it was enough. That didn't feel nice.

Then we started the coding part of the interview, and I was asked to implement some concurrency exercise. I implemented almost everything the way he wanted, but at the end, I couldn't implement the last requirement. However, I described the solution correctly, as he confirmed. After the coding part, the real interrogation began. And I'm not exaggerating; it felt like an interrogation. He asked me a lot of questions regarding databases, concurrency, and some other things without providing any feedback or giving me details about how they use those concepts/patterns. It wasn't a pleasant discussion at all.

The next day, the recruiter called me and gave me the feedback. It seems I was not a good fit due to my technical knowledge. I was really surprised. They said I didn't know concurrency because I didn't implement the last part of the coding task (which had, kind of, three parts in total), even though I correctly described the solution. But the thing that really surprised me is that they said I don't know some concepts that I am 100% sure I answered correctly. I am not upset about that, but it's not something pleasant. All interviews have a dose of subjectivity, and I can live with the fact that maybe they didn't like me.

The suggestions I have would be, first of all, to increase the duration of the interview. I felt really rushed to answer the questions. The second suggestion is to send engineers with people skills to interviews. A "bad" interviewer gives a bad image to the company. It's not only about seeing if the person in front of you knows all the answers you have; it's also about making them want to join your company.

Concurrency Database Microservices CAP theorem CQRS