First introductory meeting was good. She asked about experience, company values, motivation to work at revolut and a basic technical question: how does Java code gets executed so I explained JVM and bytecode. At the end of the interview she gave me advice about the next stage if I progress, one of them is "Do not jump to coding straightaway, ask questions and clarify the task". I progressed to the next stage and I was sent an email telling me about what the interview will be about and what to expect, and that it is important to ask questions and not start coding right away, to write tests, and a list of resources to study that are not useful and misleading in someway. The list contained: an advanced Java book which I did not understand exactly how I can use a whole book containing many topics to prepare for a 45 mins question and in very short amount of time, concurrency which I spent considerable amount of time on and a page one of their SWEs wrote about the coding interview. In the live coding interview, the interviewer did not have his camera on and told me about his role and team briefly before starting the coding part. He gave me the question which is to write a load balancer that returns a service with some requirements. Naturally, I started asking questions to understand the task. The interviewer seemed not interested and just wanted me to do "what I want". For many questions he did not answer straightaway but paused and then says "as I told you before, you can do it the way you want". So I was confused because the recruiter and the email told me to ask questions and clarify. I coded the solution and wrote the unit tests. There was no concurrency part in contradiction to what the email said to prepare for. At the end, the recruiter asked me about the time complexity of using a hashset to store the services to check if they already exist and I explained that why its constant time. Then he asked me about how exactly do hashsets perform equality checks and I explained the answer but I used the word "memory addresses" instead of "buckets" for where objects are stored. Then it was time for my questions and one of the questions that I asked was about work-life balance, overtime and weekend work and how it gets handled. He answered that they happen but not usually and there is no compensation or a standard company policy for it. It is what your manager agrees to. Such a vague answer further confirming all the burnout and stress about the role that people complain about. I received a rejection a few days later with feedback that I have a lack of understanding of the "contain" method for collections, which I used and coded the solution with but forgot what it was called in Java initially when writing the solution (coming from Python where "in" is used), and a lack of understanding of hashmaps internally that did not allow me to properly assess time complexity, which I did correctly but did not use the correct word "buckets". From the feedback I realised that this company and the stress of their work is not worth it as they are not serious about their interviews, the feedback does not even reflect what happened during the interview and just like others have said they are using a checklist.
