I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Loblaw Digital in Jul 2022
Interview
Connected with a recruiter online, phone screen, then 2 interviews over zoom.
None of the interviewers were people that I would have worked with.
First interview: discussion about your experiences and goals. Felt like a relatively open discussion, interviewer was friendly.
Second interview: technical interview with a coding question and system design. Had some communication problems with the interviewers. We had to repeat things multiple times because one of us didn't understand the other's explanation. They were also very aggressively attacking my system design solution. I would not enjoy working with these people based on how they gave feedback.
Received a rejection afterwards with no useful feedback why.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You have a legacy monolith codebase that is tightly coupled. How do you improve the maintainability and scalability while retaining functionality and not impacting customers?
1. Recruiter (super friendly and transparent)
2. Initial screening (friendly)
3 Tech round - system design and coding ( smart engineers)
4. Hiring manager
Mostly around resume, leetcode and system design around microservices
Honestly mandatory work from office for a tech company seems weird.
Recruiter was really helpful and coordinated the interview efficiently. Recruiter also provided details description of what to expect at the interview. Technical rounds had medium difficulty question but how the question was initially stated made me confused and I became nervous.
I applied online. I interviewed at Loblaw Digital (Toronto, ON) in Apr 2023
Interview
The interview process was okay. It started with Recruiter screening round, followed by technical round. The technical round went good and I had high hopes. The questions were more focused based on the resume like Kafka, ES, and past projects and challenges, followed by one coding question (find a given word in the matrix). I was able to write the program using iteration but was rejected and the reason given was that I should have solved it with recursion. If the interviewer wanted me to solve via Recursion, they should have told me upfront, how would I know that interviewer wants me to solve via Recursion. I think the interviewer had only that solution in mind and I did it via iteration so they were not able to understand it. But still, I was able to answer almost 90% of the questions and still got rejected due to this one thing, which I feel is not correct. Anyways, keep in mind and ask upfront for coding questions if they want it with iteration or recursion.