I was referred by a Spotify employee, but I don't think this reference gave me any advantage. I was asked to fill out an application form and then waited about a month for the first contact.

An HR manager contacted me by email and provided a link to an online test. This test included behavioral questions followed by numerical, verbal, and abstract thinking IQ-like tests.

It took a week to hear back from HR. She sent an email with a speaking interview time scheduled for two weeks later. The screening phone interview went well. I was mostly asked situational questions requiring answers in the STAR format. The interviewer was kind and attentive.

After two more weeks, I had a technical interview with two developers. It seemed they hadn't read my resume at all, but that was no problem for me. I was asked to talk about one of my projects. You shouldn't elaborate too much here, as they don't seem to care what you did. They tend to interrupt you and ask questions like, "How did you deploy it?" or "Which database did you use?" They expect you to explain how you applied modern development approaches like CI/CD, NoSQL, and so on.

Then came the coding part, which consisted of two coding questions. One involved finding mistakes in a code implementation of a tricky stack, and the other was to solve an algorithmic problem.

After coding, I was asked about five trivia questions regarding garbage collection, HashMap vs. TreeMap, followed by the question, "How would you find the reason why the system is slow?" If you don't have much experience with monitoring tools (knowing profilers isn't enough), you will receive this as a con in your feedback.

After one week, I received an email from HR stating they would proceed with other candidates. The feedback from the engineers mentioned a lack of experience with monitoring tools (I don't believe this is a core experience that's so hard to acquire) and, "It seems like they don't know generics." Are you serious? Without asking any questions about generics during the interview, they guessed that a programmer with eight years of experience doesn't know generics!

So, my opinion:

• The process is very, very slow.
• HR worked well, and if you prepare answers to situational questions, the screening will be okay.
• The technical interview is structured, but sometimes you have to guess what the interviewer wants to know, as they don't ask directly what they want you to explain.
• Feedback is based on guesses (using phrases like "it looks like" and "it seems") and doesn't fully reflect the candidate's reality because the knowledge mentioned in the feedback was never asked about during the interview.

Why Spotify?

How would you discover why the system is slow?

Find the 2nd largest element in an array (explain how you would find the k'th largest).

Tell me about a time when you had to give feedback to someone about their work.