I was reached out by a recruiter and then setup for the interview. The interview consists of 3 rounds, and all of them are a bit casual chat on a system design. I thought I was doing okay, and I provided more than one possible solution to the questions. I don’t think I clearly say I didn’t know something, as I answered most of the asks. But still I got rejected due to 2 reasons per the HR. First off, one of the interviewers is saying, I didn’t demonstrate enough attitude, and lack of desire to join the company, like I should demonstrate them I enjoy their technical challenges or something. This is beyond me. First, I did ask them what they are building and what the challenges are and the discussion lasted 3, 4 minutes. This interviewer straight up lying. Second, I told them the reason why I am switching my job, is due to a very practical reason, and my team are all good people. It’s just the RTO arrangement doesn’t work quite well for me. I also mentioned that I used to work at traditional banks, and the pace is very slow. Newer FinTech companies are fast in adapting changes which is something I do enjoy. If I am not determined to make a change, why do I bother taking a job interview? And again, how can you quantify attitude? I can pretend to be super excited and slacking off right after I am hired. Still, if he intended to misinterpret my willingness to join, sure. This is utterly unprofessional I must say. Second, they mention, I am not demonstrating enough knowledge on transactions. Well, I am not sure how much is enough. I said, code wise, a @Transactional annotation would do. And in a distributed system, you can consider use MQ to ensure message is delivered once, or consider using Redis cache lock to be more performant. I even mentioned that @Transactional would use cglib to regenerate the code, and wrap it with transaction, commit, rollback method. The reason sounds to me like, you said you know Java, but you don’t understand what a Serializable interface does, so you are not great. Not to mention some of the techniques I told them, they don’t seem to know about, or it’s like their first time knowing it. Again, I am deeply disappointed, and yet HR has to call me to tell you are doing great, most of the feedback is positive, but you are not chosen. I have notes on the entire interview process, just to be clear. So, I can back track what people say.

1. 30 mins phone all with recruiter; 2. code challenge as the 1st step ( you can take a few days of it) 3. Internal code review on your project. 4. decision made for next round of interview.