I applied through an employee referral. The process took four weeks.

The process was quite long and lasted around four weeks. There were multiple stages along the way:

• The call with an internal recruiter, which lasted around 20 minutes. I was asked about the usual stuff, such as what do I know about the company, why do I want to work for Zopa, my salary expectations, and more.
• The programming task, which should be finished at home in one week. The task was quite an interesting one, and I had to read about some economic formulas to solve the problem. Although, there was one major problem with the task description. The expected result provided in the task documentation was wrong. This caused me to waste quite a lot of time as I was looking for a problem in my algorithm, where the problem was in the task description.
• The phone technical interview with a senior software developer. There were several questions about Java. This part was a positive experience for me, mostly because the person who interviewed me was very professional and gave me feedback after every answer.
• The final stage, which was an onsite interview divided into three steps, where each lasted around an hour.

The first step was the pair programming part. I had to make a change in the code that I wrote in the previous stage of the interview process. This part was a bit of a joke as the person who interviewed me was not prepared properly. For some reason, he could not import my Maven project correctly, which caused IntelliJ to complain about all imports in the code. Literally every line of code was red, which obfuscated the code and made working with the code much more difficult. Also, the guy said that he never saw my code before, which was a bit weird. If I made a week's worth of effort to apply for the job, the other side could at least spend several minutes skimming through the code. A bit of advice for the future: I could bring my own laptop, and this part could be performed on it. This would solve two problems: a misconfigured workspace, and me working on a MacBook for the first time in my life.

The second step was the technical interview. After a short introduction, we jumped into my CV, and I was asked some questions about the projects I've been involved in.

The third step was the interview with a project manager and product manager. There were some questions about me working with people in my previous role, e.g., have you ever disagreed with your colleague about a work-related task, how did you present your opinion, and more.

What do you know about the Java garbage collector? Does Java pass by reference or pass by value?