Envié una solicitud electrónica. El proceso duró 4 semanas. Acudí a una entrevista en Synthace (Londres, Inglaterra)
Entrevista
Interview process was done remotely:
1) Initial call with hiring manager
2) Coding challenge
3) Architecture interview
4) Code refactor interview - failed
5) Final round?
All rounds went smoothly until the code refactor interview. The interview was ambiguous for the following reasons:
- Task title was 'Code refactor' yet instructions said there was a bug in it. Refactoring by definition means that you change the implementation without changing the result
- Instructions said I should discuss improvements as if it were providing code review for a colleague. In this case I would never refactor the code since that's the colleague's job but instead add comments and discuss
- When refactoring am I allowed to completely rewrite the original code or must I make incremental improvements? Should I write unit tests before refactoring since this is what I would do in the real world?
I was just overall a bit confused which wasted time during the interview. I felt there weren't any clear instructions.
The code that appeared in front of me was not good, and I started rewriting it but the examiner kept defending reasons as to why a particular part wasn't bad. Clearly the examiner had strong opinions on what is good and bad code which were conflicting with mine. This doesn't help during such a short interview. I believe the code refactor test would be better done as a send home exercise.
The code task itself was poor, it was very little about refactoring or OOP and more about understanding what a badly written algorithm with no comments does. The examiner was incredibly annoying and patronising and kept interrupting whilst I was processing a better solution in my head.
Overall the interview process was good but let down by a badly designed task, with poor instructions and a poor examiner near the end. My feedback to Synthace would be to go more in to depth about previous coding experience looking at GitHub code etc rather than endless coding exercises.
My advice to candidates is to have a lot of questions to ask Synthace ready as they ask you to ask questions after every round.
Solicité el puesto a través de una agencia de empleo. Acudí a una entrevista en Synthace
Entrevista
Bad culture and waste of time! Hiring manager who was supposed to, never explained the role. Sent a link to two coding tasks on Hackerrank to solve. Then, had the most bizarre experience of pairing with two not sociable person for next 45 mins. Bizarre and weird!
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
First round:
Role explanation with Hiring Manager (never happened as they were poorly)
Second round (hackerrank problem solving - time bound):
Two easy hackerrank problems.
Third Round (code pair):
Most weird. Two not sociable person with a problem to code pair and sent the link in first 30 secs. No ice breaking talks or conversations! Most uncomfortable 45 mins of coding. Then, one of them explained how they are building a "compiler" which was funny as they were clearly building some APIs but calling them compilers to sound clever. Then, this person boasted about their number of degrees and education. Very weird. Never asked about how I felt or about the company or the job/role.
Don't know if that's the office culture there to work under pressure and get judged so I won't recommend.
Seems bad culture.
Envié una solicitud electrónica. El proceso duró 2 semanas. Acudí a una entrevista en Synthace (Londres, Inglaterra)
Entrevista
Questions were suspeciously easy. They thought they were hard.
My boss was suspeciously not part of the process.
Part of the process was a lab tour, which is a huge selling point - don't fall for that!
Half the interview time was spent selling the company to me and I was too dumb to buy it.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
They called this "an architecture question":
Design a system to download a website of 10^12 pages using 10^5 computers.
Some easy assumptions
Split the task between 3 people
