I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at USAA (San Antonio, TX) in Jul 2021
Interview
After the HR interview, I've been called to another meeting with the manager, the architect, and two other engineers. I was asked a few not so hard questions about Java, and then started the live coding session, with pair programming. In this session I was supposed to call the actions to one of the engineers, and she would implement them. I was advised to use TDD, implement new tests for the proposed problem, fix the existent ones (if necessary), and explain what I was doing, and why.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the difference between a Set and a List in Java?
Just got to the screening and didn’t make it past there.
A USAA recruiter reached out to me to schedule a screening. Below is the convo.
Recruiter: “it sounds like you’re in your car. I’m concerned for your safety. Can we reschedule?”
Me: “I’m safe and I’m hands free, but if you need to reschedule we can”
Her: “so the requirement is 6 years of professional experience and I noticed that your time in the army isn’t software engineering so we won’t count that towards your experience” (the proud military company won’t count my military experience)
Me: “Well I do have well over the required minimum software Engineer experience.”
Her: “I would like to count it with you just to be sure”
At this point I’m wondering why she reached out to me in the first place other than to waste my time if she really believed I wasn’t qualified. My resume shows that I do meet that requirement though. Even after counting she doubted my experience.
She said “ok, I see you have experience with Kubernetes, but do you have experience with containers? I don’t see that on your resume.”
I said “I have Docker on my resume as well as several ways I’ve used it”
She said “I’m not sure what that is”
I said “that’s the container experience you were looking for”
She said “well let’s talk about salary requirements. The average offer for this position is about $145k. Does that work for you?”
I said “well can I ask you what the pay band is?”
She said “well it was listed on the posting $130k-$195”
I said “well I was looking for something around $175k - $180k”
She said “well that’s way too high for this position”
I said “ummm, isn’t that within the pay band listed on your posting?”
She said “well you’re getting a little disrespectful so we’re just going to go ahead and end this”
I said “uhhhh ok buh bye.”
If you are a skilled software engineer, there are tons of BIG red flags between my experience and every other review on Glassdoor. Good luck friends.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at USAA (San Antonio, TX) in Apr 2022
Interview
Applied through their career website and got a response 1 week later. Recruiter called and asked if I knew X, Y, and Z on the posting and my salary expectations.
Sent online coding assignment. 12 multiple choice about Java and APIs with 15 minutes and 2 Java coding questions, 1 very easy(add every number up until you hit N in a while loop) and then a medium question about returning a List of Accounts that were owned by 1 person that was also the jointOwner on other Accounts.
Received call that I passed the next day and scheduled 90 minute interview with 2 IT directors and lead software engineer.
30 minutes for behavioral/tell me about yourself which I felt I did pretty good on and had smiling faces the entire time.
45 minutes for technical portion which I think was my downfall. I did not know to expect to be coding so I was kinda deer in the headlights, I failed some basic Java questions about static and synchronized keywords. Easy system design about a RESTful API that a UI they show would need. 3 easyish pseudocode questions, but my anxiety got to me on the second one. Smiles were gone as I fumbled - lol. I could have easily coded them without the eyes but I just wasn't expecting to do them and I feel like other Glassdoor reviews didn't mention it lately. My fault as it was my first interview in years.
10-15 minutes of your questions for them.
Rejection email the next day just saying they were going with another candidate, despite the interviewers making it clear there were many roles, ha.
Overall I felt like they wanted to focus more on what I didn't know than they wanted to hear about what I do know.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write pseudocode to return the smallest area of a square that would surround all of a list of x,y coordinates.
Return a boolean of if an input string like "aaabbaaccc" is longer than the output of "a3b2a2c3".
Some question about given 2 Lists, return all of the duplicate items.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at USAA (Phoenix, AZ) in Apr 2022
Interview
I had total 3 rounds of Interview
1st round written test in aspiringminds -- its easy/average difficulty
Assessment Name - USAA Java Assessment v2
2nd round with tech and product director couple of project situational and behavioral Qs. follow STAR method to answer.
3rd round Panel technical. with 3 ppl. Qs below.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical Qs
Q1--Write pseudocode to return the smallest area of a square that would surround all of a list of x,y coordinates.
Q2--Return a boolean of if an input string like "aaabbaaccc" is longer than the output of "a3b2a2c3".
Q3--Some question about given 2 Lists with sorted order, merge the 2 list final list should be in sorted without duplicates.
Q4 - explain public static void main