there were two interviews and one was with the manager on the team, most of it was conversational, describe previous experience and data engineer question. along with data engineering experience.
Negative experience
Difficult interview
Application
I applied online. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Spotify (London, England) in Apr 2022
Interview
Recruiter asked for my availability 4 months after I applied and scheduled first tech interview. Didn't give any information at all on what will be covered.
Woke up at 7:30 for an 8AM interview with two DEs from Sweden. They proceed by asking programming and concurrency theory with very little focus on SQL and databases.
Asked for clarifications on the process to which they answered that they didn't even know this was for an internship position and they are simply asking the full time questions. It was obvious that they were simply reading questions from an internal list.
It was an appalling and disappointing experience, mainly because job requirements do not fit at all with the questions asked during interview.
I interviewed at Amazon and Meta and obtained internships positions. These are companies that offer significant incentives and they only asked SQL and python.
Compared to the above, Spotify offers a Software Engineering with a focus on data position rather than a DE position. They asked a lot of programming theory, about how to use tools that I haven't worked with before, and even concurrency.
This doesn't seem like an adequate DE internship interview and the position should be better marketed/described better.
P.S.: Please no nonsense response from company, there are no excuses for this kind of treatment from such a big company. Take responsibility and do better.
Also, Spotify CEO: "We have no time for entitled egos.". Ridiculous.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. CAP Theorem
2. Time complexity for different data structures
3. Concurrency, threads, processes
4. How to write SQL queries in Scala
5. How to do the equivalent of SQL queries in Excel
6. Difference between synchronous and asynchronous api calls
7. Hadoop & Map Reduce
8. Difference between imperative and functional programming languages
9. SQL to select count of users that played a track
10. Garbage collector
11. Static vs dynamic
12. Hash tables, collisions and constant time extraction