Treated like a vegetable.

Three interviews; coding challenge 7 days, telephone w. 2 developers, face-to-face.

1. Got a coding challenge on HackerRank that should be completed within 7 days.

Create a main app that reads a very large number (10^5) of lines containing (start, end, value) lines. For example: 1 - 7, value 5 5 - 10, value 2 6 - 6, value 1 That should give result: 5 5 5 5 7 8 7 2 2 2.

Return the greatest value (8). Start and stop can also be very great (10^7).

There are 7 test cases; six of them can easily be handled, but the last one is impossible with the large number of lines and values and the runtime constraints given by the hosted service.

I spent five days on this, partly because I started to be bitten by the challenge.

1. Got invited to a telephone meeting with two developers for 90 minutes. Also here, I should make some coding in a Google document.

2. Finally got invited to meet the overlords at SAP for about 2 hours. In my case, I had to go by bus from Denmark to Germany for this the day before and back the next day.

Got there; meeting started with being shown around on different office floors, then another set of confusion and running around to find a free meeting room.

Then started the THIRD CODING EXERCISE, now with IntelliJ on a Mac with a German keyboard. That went terrible since I could not find special characters and was very confusing and stressful on top of all the running around before.

I produced some code but very slow, and after a while, I was completely worn out and unfocused.

Next meeting with manager, which was very nice and shows me around some more. Nice because I probably already flunked the test.

In retrospect, I realize that what they do is some charts for sales in Scala inside some Java environment. Actually, do not sound very sexy or interesting.

Conclusion

Don’t apply for this job unless you are prepared to code A LOT. They are not interested in you, your experiences, or interests; just how good a coding monkey you are under stressed situations, situations that they will happily supply you with.

The office is a 1-hour commute from Berlin.

You will NOT be told beforehand how much work this requires, and you will NOT be informed about the full process beforehand.

In short, you are just a vegetable that they can treat as they see fit and that shall be pushed through their undisclosed grinding process.

Describe the two types of implicits in Scala.