I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Spotahome (London, England) in Apr 2019
Interview
Slow, Slow veeeery slow, with lag in communication. 5 Interviews, on the 3rd one they told me they dont want me and then they call me a week later to tell me that they like me now... I guess people who were before me declined the offer... I understand why now... they are the worst.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Software Development Engineer
What we expect to learn about you with this exercise is:
● Your working style
● How you think and solve problems
● Your coding style
Technology:
To solve this problem we prefer that you use PHP since it is the programming language which
our backend services are written.
As an example, at Spotahome we use PHP 7 with Symfony or Zend framework.
Feel free to apply all your programming skills and learned techniques from your professional
experience.
Exercise:
Write a web application that fetches an XML from a remote url and presents the data in a
sortable table.
Tasks:
1. Fetch the remote XML file
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/sah-pub-feeds/mitula-UK-en.xml in your backend
code
2. Show a list of data: id, title, link, city and main image from the XML downloaded
3. It should be able to sort by any field by clicking on the table header
4. Allow to download the data sorted as shown in screen as a JSON file
Tips:
● The implementation should be written using the best development practices like
SOLID principles
● Try to complete all the tasks and never lose focus on quality
● While there is no time limit for the test, we recommend spending about 3-4 hours on
it
After you finish the exercise, please reply to the email with the solution.
Thanks for your feedback. We're sorry this happened - we are going through a very high volume of hirings right at the moment, and we recognise there is room for improvement in the process. Thanks for letting us know your experience.
Other Software Engineer interview reviews for Spotahome
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Spotahome (London, England) in Apr 2019
Interview
Call with recruiter, call with hiring manager, then a test (3h - I took a bit longer), then a review with an engineer of the test, then a final, all remote except the last one.
It was super interesting to learn about Spotahome, they seem to be growing at a healthy rate. All the interviewers made time for me to ask questions.
The recruiter was fast and efficient and got back within a day.
The only negative thing was that I couldn't really get an answer of what position I was interviewing for. They are building the team in London so they can't really tell you which part of the product you will be working on. They all seem interesting so I wanted to go ahead anyway. I will try again in 6 months or so.
I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Spotahome (Madrid) in Mar 2019
Interview
Firstly, the recruiter contacted me through Linkedin and we had a call after that, then I a had a call with an engineering manager and the asked me to go through a technical challenge that had to be completed in three hours. After that, I had a technical interview with two engineers to review my solution to the challenge. Finally, I had another interview with an engineer and another engineering manager, more oriented to culture-fit related matters. After that, I received an email from the recruiter communicating me that they were not going to move forward with me because even though they considered me to be technically knowledgeable, they were going to proceed with a "more senior" candidate who suits their immediate needs. I found that there was a lack of honesty in the message and the whole process and I felt mistreated, since that if it were about a matter of technical skills, they could have made that decision much sooner, more taking into account that the told me at the very beginning that they were rapidly growing and wanted to grow a lot in following months. Also, I didn't feel challenged enough during the interview as for they to say that I wasn't senior enough...
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Develop a web application that loads home information from an XML feed and shows it through a web page being able to short it by any field and also to download it as a JSON file. Do it in just three hours.