Sainsbury’s Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The initial screening is done via Hackajob, which is a bit of a pain for coding tests. The test screen has four panes (instructions, IDE, testing IDE, output terminal) that are hard to manage on a laptop since some can't be minimized and the formatting is bad, not like a real IDE. You get a coding challenge about intervals in a log stream with datetimes (fun!). There's also a REST API question where you query an API and slightly change the response; I missed details because the instructions were only about 2 inches wide. They say 90 mins but suggest 45-55 mins for both, including unit tests, which seems tight. Since the next step is discussing it with an interviewer, I would have preferred a take-home assignment over the project question.

Don't bother applying here. You'll probably get rejected even after finishing the coding assessment. The assessment was pretty easy, but the platform made coding very hard. I spent way too much time fighting the platform. It also didn't work right - the editor kept saying my Java code was wrong, and the reload button for Spring often broke. You'd have to reload the page to fix it. Even though I passed all the tests and was happy with my code, they said I failed. It's ridiculous. You can't reach the hiring team, they ignore messages. I even messaged the recruiter on LinkedIn about the coding platform, and they ghosted me. If this is how they treat candidates, I can't imagine how they treat employees.

The first stage was a technical assessment with a simple problem, but the testing tool was a bit tricky to use. I finished both questions and felt good about my answers, but then got a message saying they'd already chosen people based on resumes, which made me wonder why they even did the technical test. I'm giving it a positive rating though because it did help me feel more confident about my technical skills.