Interview Process & Prep Guide
Step 1 – Apply Online
Someone from Talent Acquisition schedules a 30-minute call to explain the role and ask for your salary expectations. If that goes well, you’ll get a 1-hour interview with the manager.
Round 1 – Manager Interview
You’ll likely meet a 30+ years experienced manager who knows all the modern buzzwords but may not be very familiar with technologies from the last decade.
The conversation is mostly about:
Explaining what you’ve worked on in the last 6 months
Walking through technologies and design decisions
Be ready to explain things at a very fundamental level, because questions may include gems like:
“How did you figure out which class or method had the bug?”
Round 2 – Technical Interview
This round includes:
The same manager
Two lead developers
They again ask about your recent work, but go slightly deeper into:
Libraries used
Implementation decisions
Then the manager pulls out a couple of classic Java problems from the internet and asks you to review or explain them. Thankfully, it’s usually discussion-based rather than live coding.
After the Interview
I sent a thank-you email the same day and a follow-up a week later. A few days after that, I got the classic “moving forward with other candidates” message.
If you’re selected, you’ll probably hear much sooner.
Preparation Tips
The environment appears to be a carefully preserved time capsule:
COBOL applications still exist
No cloud
Waterfall development
Separate offshore QA team
Separate DBA team writing queries
What to study:
Basic HackerRank / LeetCode problems
Pre-Java-8 style solutions
Basic Spring awareness
What not to overprepare:
Modern architecture, cloud-native design, reactive frameworks, or anything invented in the last decade.
Final Advice
If you want the job, adapt to the technological timeline of the company.
Sometimes success in interviews isn’t about knowing the latest technology — it’s about not being several generations ahead of the conversation.
