Schwab Senior+ Java Developer Interview Experience — A Final Onsite with No Break Between Interviews

After I talked with the recruiter, there was no phone interview. They scheduled the final onsite directly. I live locally and the office was not far from my current company, so I took half a day off and drove over for the interview.

Interview schedule

First, I spent 45 minutes talking with the hiring manager. It was mainly about understanding my background and answering behavioral questions.

Next came about two hours of technical interviews with a tech lead from the team and two engineers. Those interviews also included some behavioral questions.

The main topics included explaining basic Spring framework concepts and the different types of dependency injection.

They also gave me an implementation of a RESTful controller to review. I needed to identify what was inadequate and what should be improved, such as whether error handling was appropriate, whether performance could be improved, and whether utility-class instances were being created repeatedly.

A few thoughts about the second technical section: first, answering questions from several employees continuously for such a long time was extremely tiring. There was no break in the middle.

Second, there was no clear flow. For example, they did not reserve one block of time for code and then switch to system design, or do those sections in the opposite order.

Instead, all kinds of questions were mixed together. One engineer would ask about code, another engineer would interrupt with a related system design question, and then a third engineer would circle back to the code again, and so on.

Finally, there was the use of tools. I had asked the team in advance whether they would provide a shared platform such as HackerRank for the technical evaluation. They told me there would not be one and that I needed to bring my own computer for the technical demonstration.

When it was actually time to assess coding ability, they could not provide an enterprise network connection. One engineer ended up putting the question on the large screen while I verbally explained the implementation and the improvements.