I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Advanon (Zürich) in Nov 2018
Interview
I applied to Advanon directly, for a Java/Kotlin Research Engineer role. First interview was ok, HR talk + some really basic programming questions.
The next step was completing a task. The technologies to use were predefined, along with the language (Kotlin). There was no time limit. The task was quite large: not especially hard, but required way more work than a normal trial-task of other companies. I submitted my solution on a Monday. Got a reply giving their response-time to be "around a day or so". Got no feedback until Friday, so I sent a reminder. Got a reply 2 hours later informing me that my application was rejected in favor of a better candidate: this is ok, perfectly normal thing to happen.
But:
I was also given the reasons on why my task was rejected. I would consider 2 of those as minor, but valid points, the other 2 were alarming:
1. "*readme references gradle build instead of ./gradlew build*"
2. "getMapById doesn't appear to return anything and uses a html for no clear reason template"
As a developer I cannot make sense of Point 1. The only explanation I can think of is that somebody there is so obsessed with Linux that:
a, did not bother making the obvious transformation from the Windows command to the Linux command
b, afterwards did not bother running the application (which was working fine, covered by unit&integration tests + tested by 3 friends as well)
I was really shocked by brushing a solution aside over this, so I sent a mail mentioning these points and asking for some clarification. Got no reply at all.
Taking into account the large task versus zero-effort in evaluating it, it was a really frustrating experience.