Hack The Box interview questions

The interview was done in four parts. - HR Interview [1h] - Technical Interview [1h] - Home assessment [1 week] - Technical Interview around the assessment [1h] The first interview was the usual HR round, where they asked details on my previous experiences. The second round was a general tech knowledge interview, focused on web developement. The assessment was quite hard, as it requires a lot of time if you want to be thorough, The project was mostly done, but there were various issues you had to identify and correct. The issues could be simple things like cache invalidation bugs, to more niche bugs, such as some tests not running properly due to the spring profile setups. Having seen a variety of assessment, this felt as a better evaluation of skill than most. The last round was focus on the assessment, what choices I made, if i could run the entire project in "production" mode (meaning you have to set up all container apps, proper profile, resolve some bugs around the app and the certificate issue). They made sure to question my non-obvious choices and pointed out some weeknesses I didn't fully resolve or even added. For all interviews, the people involved were very easy to talk to, and all three talks felt very fair. Even when something unknown came up, it felt natural to discuss it with them. Overall, a very pleasant experience. The entire process took more than two months. The first interview was mid February, and the third interview was in the first week of April. The final yes /no took some time as well (with Easter in between), as I got my answer at the end of April.

The interview process took ages with extreme loops of waiting (almost 2 weeks). The first round was with the HR as in the most cases right now. Second round was a technical interview that was focus on theoretical stuff around Java and Spring. The gave extreme focus on Webflux what it is , how it works under the hood. They focused also in DB concepts like locking, ACID, isolation level and indexing. In the end they told that they suspected that I use AI in the interview... But I haven't. For me this was the first red flag, cause their justification to this statement was that I was very informed about the Webflux concepts and I answered all the questions... I was being promoted to the third round which was a very demanding code review and patching challenge with on a springboot project as a take home test. It took me almost a week to review it and patch it. Fourth round was the debrief of the project in live session. The guys there weren't so keen on collaborating, rather than trying to let me down and divert me from the right path. While I was explaining my approach , they often interrupt me and asked me irrelevant questions like why I did that in that way , cause the other way is better . While I defend my implementation with pure justification about the trade offs I made and the reason why I made them , they purely focus on how I had run the application and challenge this way too. Ok somewhere there I understood that it's not gonna work and I truly felt a little bit embarrassed with their behavior. Of course after almost 2.5 weeks I received an email stating I need to improve my coding skill. Ok cest la vie...