I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Ocado Group (London, England) in May 2019
Interview
I applied through a recruiter(understandingrecruitment).
Step 1 - Phone interview with the external recruiter
Step 2 - Online assessment Java test. Three problems in 180 minutes via codility.com testing platform. Easy to medium difficulty. You have to try to solve these problem in the more efficient way, not just "brute foce" way.
Step 3 - Remote coding exercise with one of ocado developer via codility, very easy one. The purpose of this more than evaluating your solution is your collaboration with your partner, etc.
I am Italian and he politely told me that in order to make me advance in the selection process in the worst case scenario, we could be part of the remote interview.
The external recruiter told me that ocado do not pay travel expenses for those who already have a job currently and put pressure on me to go to them.
Okay, it seemed like a good chance for me so I took a vacation, booked a plane the day before and went to them.
The day of the interview was like this:
1) CFC Tour – approx. 45 minutes – a guided tour of their automated warehouse to see what Ocado Technology is about
2) Pair Programming Interview - this will be up to a 2 hour session where the candidate is required to solve a problem using laptop/IDE and they work collaboratively with a Senior Software Engineer /Team Leader. They will provide a laptop for the candidate. -> Yeah, true. I think the second developer who had to participate in the interview had a last minute commitment and so the hr girl recovered another developer at the last minute.
3) They offered me lunch, giving me some vouchers for their table but they left me alone during the lunch break
4) Technical Interview - Approximately 1 hour - whiteboard exercise with two developer
5) IT Head Interview – approx. 30 mins to an hour - cultural fit
They didn't know I was Italian, I don't think they use such innovative technologies as described in the announcement but it depends a lot on the department where you go to work from what I understand.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The best way to determine the points that are in a certain area, do a small code review of a stack implementation in Java, from a word tell if that can be arranged in a palindrom one, cultural question like "tell me of a situation when you fell like you have been misjudged" etc
I applied online. I interviewed at Ocado Group (Kraków)
Interview
I don't remember every aspect of that interview well, but I know there were a few deep-level questions about how data structures work. Interview was conducted by two devs. It seemed formal and the atmosphere was rough.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why array elements are instant access when you know their index?
The first stage was quite a hard test task. Then I was invited to the second stage for an interview which did not go well for me. The conversation was conducted in a friendly atmosphere
Reached out by hr and scheduled first round. Everyone I met are very friendly but their interview is not typical and the algorithm question I got is a bit tricky.
So the first round has two parts. First part they ask some java, oop, design and db related questions. They cover quite a lot topics. This requires some time to prepare if you want to cover everything. Just from a candidate point of view, I feel it’s not worth to spend time preparing so much for one single company in a hunting season because you probably won’t be asked elsewhere. Second part is a algorithm question but a tricky one. I don’t remember exactly but it’s like you have the answer immediately after you understand the questions, but you tends to overthink because of the context.