The interview was for a full-stack SDE position with a team at Disney, in which the team's work has a great impact on the entire company. After an initial on-site interview with a group's manager, I was asked for an on-site panel group interview. The group panel lasted for four hours.
I was rejected for two reasons after the interview. The first reason I was told is that my Javascript skill was not as expected. The only Javascript question is about closure. I, however, don't believe the Javascript question could be used to disqualify a full-stack position nor it was the real reason the interviewer who asked the question wanted to reject me. In the panel interview, I felt that their implement was too complicated. So, I said, "it (the implementation) is quite complicated". The interviewer replied, "we need to implement it in the way so that we don't need to be asked what encryption algorithm is used in our APIs". I responded, "JSON Web Tokens (implementation) come with the encryption algorithm information". The interviewer didn't say anything at this point. The real reason the interviewer wanted to reject me, to my understanding, is to prevent someone else come up with a better solution which has a great impact on the entire company.
The second reason is that I had expressed a lack of interesting in working on the front end. I scratch my head and try to figure out where this reason came from. The only related situation was that the engineering team manager, who is in his 30's, asked me what area I would like to work on, front end or back end. As a Java engineer, I answered the back end. And I mentioned that I had created beautiful UIs in my previous projects I was proud of my works. How my answer to the question turns into a situation I expressed a lack of interesting in working on the front end? The manager's business conduct shall be examined.
S, why he wanted to twist the fact? The real reason, again, is to prevent other people to come up with a better solution, to my belief. During his interview session, he asked me to walk through the design of a pet adoption mobile app from the front end to the back end. On the back end, I wrote a single one line of Spring Data code for searching pets for a given search conduction. And I asked whether they used Spring Data for their data access layer or not. He answered that they used Hibernate. I said, "Spring Data, as a newer technology, is much quicker to write (the data access code)". As a manager of the engineering team, he definitely had the responsibility of selecting Hibernate. He won't feel comfortable if someone else pointed out that the selection is the best one and things could be done much faster.
Disney up management might want to take a look at your managers
1) whether they make any decision for the company's benefits or for their benefits while they get paid by the company.
2) whether their business conduct meets the company guideline or not, and whether some of them twist the fact for protecting their benefit, but not the company's benefit.