I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Springer Nature (Berlim) in Aug 2016
Interview
Got Telephone intro by HR member and was thereafter sent a coding challenge.
They have 3 developer groups in London and want to start three identical groups in Berlin. (Ruby, Java and Scala)
Code was evaluated by group in London. Chances are, they are not interested in expanding in Berlin.
Don't waste your time on this company or process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Got a coding challenge where I was supposed to build an application from scratch. App should receive commands for creating a canvas, drawing lines, rectangles and Bucket fill.
I used 1 1/2 day on this.
This was apparently not enough since this was the feedback:
* readme has design discussions
Well, I have to convey my thoughts to you somewhere don’t I?
Is that a MAJOR problem?
* some validation working
* reverse lines/rectangles work
* (some) graphical acceptance tests
* readme has no run instructions
Is that a MAJOR problem?
* easy to cause crash with incomplete/invalid commands: 'C' or 'L -1 -1', 'C 10 -1’
Sorry should have tested for negative values, easy to fix in one place.
* can't refill or fill lines
Is that a MAJOR problem?
* test named: '"App" should "have tests"' with implementation: true should === (true)
* no test coverage apart from acceptance tests (which don't exercise full set of commands)
Is that a MAJOR problem?
* control loop logic intermixed with parsing
* canvas operations return an array of strings instead of the canvas.
Sorry, this is unnecessary since I use toStringArray() later anyway so toStringArray is executed twice.
* sealed class with "getters" used instead of case class
Is that a MAJOR problem?
* no encapsulation of fields or private methods within classes (Canvas/Cell)
Obviously these was major concerns. ALL tests should be done and ALL possible errors should be catched.
I think is is VERY much to demand for a initial coding challenge. Should you put one week of work to be able to talk to the company?