TBA Interview Questions
& Process

The first part of the interview was about the company, you, and the roles, and the second part was a challenging STAR competency interview that really stressed me out. I did a lot of prep for the interview, studying the company, watching YouTube videos on interview techniques, and summing up my experience, but that STAR competency questions are BS to my opinion as they didn't really apply to my working experience. If you are specific about your answers you get the job... it doesn't matter if you have experience or not.

I applied online for a Junior Software Developer position (Java) at TBA in Düsseldorf, Germany. They reached out within days. The role involved backend development, performance optimization, UI design, and communication. The first contact was a phone call with two managers, lasting about an hour. They gave an overview of the company and its two offices (Delft, Netherlands, and Düsseldorf). We then discussed my past experience, career goals, and expectations, focusing on my motivations for each career move, like choosing my university major or switching jobs. They responded within a week, inviting me for a second interview. Since they wouldn't cover my travel expenses from abroad, we arranged this interview via Skype. A week before, I received a coding assignment: a Java application to parse and visualize a 200KB log file (around 4000 lines) with data like 'Timestamp, Vehicled, x-coordinate, y-coordinate, process duration, process type'. The goal was a complete product with unit tests, a GUI, and documentation, plus ideas for integrating it into their legacy code. While the tasks weren't overly difficult, they required significant time. I could use third-party libraries but chose not to. I spent several evenings on it but couldn't finish everything on time, so I sent only the source code and execution instructions, omitting documentation and tests. Embarrassingly, during the subsequent call, none of the managers could run my application due to some errors. I had to send screenshots via email to prove it worked. We then discussed my code, patterns, database integration ideas, and specific code segments. They were more interested in my problem-solving approach than my coding skills, asking about my coding style, testing/documentation habits, and UI design. They occasionally pointed to code snippets and asked for explanations. This call lasted about an hour. A week after, I received an email stating I didn't get the job, with feedback that my coding test performance was lower than others'.

It was a 3 step interview. First, they introduced the company culture. Then, there were assessments where I had to create different outfit combinations for various scenarios. Finally, there was a face-to-face interview where they shared information about company benefits, and what to do and not do.

We had an online meeting on Teams with the company's CO, the manager of the department, and the HR Manager. The HR Manager set up the interview, and questions were asked by everyone involved.