A technical phone screen lasted for about 20 minutes. The questions were standard baselines for C#, ASP.NET, and SQL. Several terms from the Scrum framework were used but it did not sound like an agile product development environment.
The onsite interview consisted of three panels and lasted just shy of two hours.
The first was technical in nature consisting of the Solution Architect and Lead Developers. Several of the questions asked were the same as from the phone screen, even being asked by the same individual. Another panelist asked only one question and otherwise seemed disinterested in participating. Statements that deadlines were of great importance, efforts were centered around quarterly releases, lead roles generally spend 50% "leading" (meaning mostly attending meetings), unit tests and automation are not the norm, developers primarily work in isolation, tasks are assigned by seniors to juniors, and output being the primary metric highlighted the Taylor mentality.
Technical Product Analysts and the Quality Assurance manager began the second panel by stating that one was the beginning of the process and the other was the end, serving as another indicator of the waterfall approach. There is no risk-based approach to prioritizing the minimal test automation and there is a poor implementation of cases for data-based operations. Non-collaborative, throw it over the wall, hand offs were the exit and entry points for each phase of work. The latest project was presented as creating a monolith instead of a more maintainable and extendable architecture.
Closing the interview was a brief session with the Development Manager and VP. The discussion included culture. Learning and professional development have not been a priority, but they may be putting some effort into that in the next few quarters. It was stressed that the process is not the Agile(tm) method but included various aspects, which were actually traditional project meetings branded as Scrum events, further exposing misunderstanding of the agile philosophy.
Most of the people were pleasant and friendly, but the environment is not one of collaboration and learning.
