I applied through a staffing agency. I interviewed at Ocado Group (Hatfield, East of England, England) in Feb 2010
Interview
I applied Ocado through agent. They asked me to send CV and cover letter. I was then asked to do an online test on Java. The online test was very difficult, and covered many concepts rarely used. Passed that and got onsite interview. The test consists of two questions, one is basically logical, you were given some basic operation, like increment, minus, multiply, and then you use these operations to define other operations, like test equality, nonequality, and so on. The other one is to finish an incomplete program. The program is about linked list, to test the size. Messed about this part.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Linked list. Base class and derived class. Complete the missing part about size test.
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.