Skyscanner Senior Fullstack Developer interview questions

I applied online and promptly got invited to a hackerrank exercise. The exercise is easy to solve if you do some research (it seems the problems are re-occuring). After that there was a screening call with HR. The HR person was very helpful in providing information on how to prepare for the following interview steps; (1) Skype call 1:1 with software engineer, (2) full day of interviews at their headquarters in Scotland. The 1:1 Skype call was easy, involving common web questions about cookies and HTTP. The headquarters interview is mainly focused on behavioral questions and then some web problem solving. For the behavioral questions you should reflect on your previous jobs and try to answer questions like "Tell me about your biggest accomplishment". These can be harder than technical questions and can only be perfected with practice. You need to be able and answer every such question with something that highlights you. At the same time you need to show that you are human and make mistakes. I prepared by answering randomly such questions for 10 days every day prior to the main interview. I did pretty good as well since most of the "bad" feedback was on the technical side. For the final interview at the headquarters you will be given about 5-6 interview slots involving: * Hard problem - supposedly a hard web problem. I had two of those. * Bar raiser - supposedly a way to evaluate that you are better, equal or worse than the average personal. * Expertise - getting into details about something you worked in the past. * Culture - behavioral questions. * Lunch - off the record lunch with a fellow software engineer. Unfortunately for me, from the feedback I got back I didn't do good with the expertise one and one of the hard problems. That was a bit sad to hear since I think part of the problem was the lack of engagement from the interviewer and vagueness in what exactly they wanted. For example in one of the questions they wanted me to reduce bots scraping their page without giving clear information on how the page was structured. When I gave high level solutions to this however, they wanted very detailed answers instead. This doesn't make much sense to me and gives you a feeling of being cheated. I suggest you practice solving such problems with a very hard audience. In retrospection it seems that they would be impressed if you were very pushy and managed to get a clear requirement for the problem on the whiteboard no matter what. Generally a good experience and it seems a good place to work. For preparation I suggest behavioural questions, scalability (scaling database, bottlenecks) and lastly solving a design problem on the white-board with a very tough audience (make sure you get the requirements no matter the intimidation).