Danske Bank Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I applied for the graduate program, and the interview process was really smooth and professional. They covered the expenses to fly to Denmark to get a face-to-face interview, and also put me in contact with former graduates to learn from them. The hiring people in the graduate program make you fell really valuable and they follow a really professional method. Really recommend that to graduates starting their careers in IT.

So after my CV got screened, the first thing was an IQ and logic test, it had pattern recognition and some number stuff. If that went well, I got invited to an assessment center with a few other candidates. It was really well organized, with twice as many bank people as candidates. They told us we were special because only a few out of about 5000 applicants made it. They even said they might hire all of us, some of us, or none of us. At the assessment center, we first did a 1-hour programming test in our chosen language, focusing on structured programming. Then, I had an individual interview with the hiring manager and an IT colleague. They knew my CV really well and asked tons of questions about my background, future goals, and past projects. They grilled me on structured programming in C or Java and my previous code, even asking 2 coding questions per second – it was intense! They advised brushing up on basic structured programming. That interview was over an hour. Then, I went home and waited for a call within a week. The next stage was a super tricky 3-hour personality test. After that, I expected an invitation for the final interview, which was with the hiring manager and a senior HR person. This was all about personality and how I did on the test, and it felt overwhelming, needing a deep understanding of myself. A week later, I got the final decision call. Even though they said I was an extraordinary candidate, they decided not to hire me. It's disappointing because I spent days on this application, including travel, and got no feedback. I think I messed up the personality test. Good luck to others. Danske Bank seems great, and people are probably happy there. They just made a mistake not hiring me.

I applied through a recruiter and was given a homework task to create REST endpoints for a 15 puzzle game. The requirements were to make RESTful endpoints, use OO principles, and provide a tested solution without a game solver or front end. It needed to be in-memory, no DB required. After submitting my solution that covered the main points, I received feedback: "This seems like a very basic approach to the problem. Simple doesn't have to mean bad, the simpler we solve problems the better, but this is somewhat outdated and narrow-minded for what we would expect of a senior dev joining a team. We won't invite the candidate for the interview." The task description itself asked for a basic implementation and didn't specify how sophisticated it should be. This response left a bad impression about the company culture and their respect for candidates' time.