I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Capital One (Nottingham, Angleterre) in Nov 2018
Interview
There was a screening code test on HackerRank, which failed to work multiple times, but was progressed onto next stage anyway. so cant say much about that, from what i could see looked like basic array manipulation
Phone interview with hiring manager, just general questions about experience and more detail about the job and job fit.
Then face to face interview which contained 4 parts
- Job fit
- White board system design
- behavioral
- paired programming
All of which were in a somewhat relaxed atmosphere.
Feedback I received was interesting, apparently they felt I was somewhat "bluffing" which was slightly offensive, not sure how this was founded as any question they asked to dig deeper was answered. They were critical having to probe for more information despite following the suggested STAR method and not knowing what was on their structured answer sheet.
Felt like hacker rank failing to work, worked against me as the exposure they had to my development skills was limited to a 1 hour of paired programming, I had offered up code from some published apps I had written which would have shown 100's/1000's of hours of my coding effort instead, but they didn't really seem interested which I found weird.
In the end there was a stronger candidate, so although I had "passed the interviews" the position was taken.
Everyone I met through the day was super nice and welcoming, a somewhat enjoyable day really just a shame they felt like I was bluffing.
Surprisingly manageable — the interview felt more like a conversation than an interrogation. It began with a sequence of coding questions, including one on merging overlapping intervals. The real challenge came during system design, where I had to outline a URL shortener service that could scale impressively. Interestingly, I had just looked at a similar architecture on PracHub, which helped me articulate my thoughts clearly. The technical questions wrapped up with validating a binary search tree, and I ended with a positive vibe. I received an offer, but ultimately chose to decline it.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Merge overlapping intervals from a list of time ranges
Interviewed for an engineer position, the interview was a joke. Asked basic OOP question with a few follow ups - no system design portion. Interviewer was very laid back and chill, didn't take it to seriously.
Was not too difficult. three total interviews all on the same day back to back. technical one, behavioral one and a case which was more of just a debugging question