The first interview was with the recruiter – a screening call. There were general questions about my experience, as well as technical questions. The interviewer was positive and friendly, so I had a good impression.

The second interview was a live coding session. In my case, it was a URL Shortener problem. The interviewer was moody from the very beginning. I hadn't even received the task yet, but I already knew I wouldn't pass to the next round simply because of his attitude.

A year ago (July 2024), I interviewed with Revolut as well, and I had a very pleasant experience. I successfully passed the "Live coding" stage. The interviewer was fully involved in the process, guided it, answered my questions, and was very positive. At the end, he took screenshots of my code. This is a good decision because it provides confidence that feedback would be justified and objective (whether positive or negative) with screenshots as evidence.

This time (July 2025), it was quite the contrary. The interviewer wasn’t involved at all. It seemed like I was disturbing him with the interview, pulling him away from something more important to him. I had to guide the interview myself.

When I finished the first method, I stopped to wait for his instructions on whether to proceed with tests or another method. But he was silent. After waiting some time in complete silence, I asked him directly if I needed to write tests. He replied, "Ah, yeah, let’s write tests," as if he were asleep and I had just awakened him with my question. It’s not my job to remind the interviewer that we need to stop and write some tests. Why should I control the interview process?

Then, I proposed adding some validations for the input value to the method. However, he ignored it. I asked about it several times, but he kept ignoring it. In the feedback, he stated, "No validations were added." Seriously? I asked you several times if I could add them because there were no explicit requirements, so it was just my proposal, nothing more. If you ignore my question several times, I consider it as "No." I don't read minds. You either provide clear requirements or you appreciate proactiveness and respond in a timely manner. Validations are all about business rules, which are part of the requirements and the interviewer's responsibility. I could implement a bunch of validations and still not guess what is on the interviewer's mind. Also, we only had one hour, so we don't need to add all possible validations, and that's why they should be specified by the interviewer explicitly. If a candidate doesn’t even mention the possibility of adding validation, that’s one thing. But if a candidate proposes to add validations themselves and asks for clarification on which ones to implement, that’s completely different.

All in all, there was a lack of requirements, and I had to clarify them several times. Yet, in the feedback, I was blamed for not being attentive to details and not implementing all requirements, some of which were not even communicated to me. I covered all cases in tests and noted the lack of requirements, asking about it. But since he was distracted by something else, he didn't notice. It wasn't me who was not attentive; it was the interviewer himself who was not attentive and not involved. It's like providing a review for a book you've never read.

Furthermore, the interviewer failed to evaluate the time complexity of my solution. He wrote in the feedback that I was the one who didn't provide the correct answer, which is untrue. It seems like he wrote his feedback while looking in a mirror, describing himself during the interview. It had nothing to do with my actual answers. I've already read at least one review on Glassdoor about Revolut interviews where a candidate was blamed in the feedback for not mentioning something during the interview, which they actually did mention. This happened to me as well. My interviewer didn’t take any screenshots of my code… That's very convenient if you don't want the candidate to advance, as it leaves a lot of room for manipulation in the feedback.

What CQRS stands for, what is GIL, what are issues with concurrency, what data structures are used in DB indexes, what is time complexity for getting an element in a hashmap in the worst case, URL Shortener.