I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Spotify (Stockholm, Stockholm) in May 2019
Interview
I was referenced by spotify worker but I don't think this reference gave me any advantage. I was asked to fill application form and then was waiting about 1 month for the first contact. HR manager contact me by email and gave link to online test. That test had behavioral questions followed by numeric, verbal and abstract thinking IQ like tests. It took a week to get hear back from HR and she sent an email with speaking interview time (after 2 weeks). Screening phone interview passed well. I was asked mostly situation questions where you need to answer in STAR manner. The interviewer was kind and attentive.
After two week more I had a technical interview with two developers. It looks like they didn't read my resume at all but no problem for me. I was asked to tell about one of my project. You shouldn't talk much here because they don't care what you did. They just interrupt you and start ask questions like "how did you deploy it "which db did you use". They expect here from you to tell how did you apply modern development approaches like CD CI , nosql and so on.
Then was coding part which consists of two coding questions. One is to find mistakes in code (it was implementation of a tricky Stack) and another is to solve algorithmic problem.
After coding I was asked about five trivia question about gc, hashmap vs treemap, followed by question "how would you find the reason of why the system is slow" and if you didn't have much experience with monitoring tools(knowing profiler is not enough) you will get this as cons in feedback.
After one week I got email from HR that they will proceed with another candidates and feedback from engineers where was mentioned lack of experience with monitoring tools (I don't believe that it is a core experience which is so hard to get ) and "it seems like doesn't know generics" - are you serious? without asking any question about generics on interview they guessed that a programmer with 8 years of experience doesn't know generics!
So my opinion:
- process is very very slow
- hr worked good and if you prepare answer to situational questions screening will be ok
- technical interview is structured but sometimes you should guess what the interviewer wants to know as they don't ask directly what they want you explained.
-feedback based on guesses (with words "it looks like", "it seems") and doesn't fully reflect reality about candidate because knowledge mentioned in feedback were never asked on interview.
Was reached out by recruiter after cold apply. Interviewer asked basic questions to know the background as initial screening step, but didnt proceed to next steps after cancelling the scheduled interviews. suspect its bc visa issues
In overall, it was a positive experience. Everybody's nice there. I like every step and challenge.
Everybody was supportive and well informed about the whole interview process which was really long.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (New York, NY) in Dec 2021
Interview
1) 15min recruiter screening. The recruiter was nice but seem to be in a rush the whole time.
2) 1hr screening with a senior engineer and one person shadowing. The question was pretty easy and dealt with implementing a cache using a language of your choice. The interviewer was super nice and pleasant to work with. He seemed to know a lot and care about D&I.
2 weeks later I asked for a follow up and the recruiter told me the position was closed. Bruh. A waste of my time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Something along the lines of implement a cache.
And a bunch of general questions regarding CS concepts that you either know it or don't. (It won't be hard if you have a CS degree or experience with SWE),