I applied Java Software Engineer position in Berlin with my 4+ years experience as it is written in the job description. I did coding challenge with all requirements including bonuses, running in docker containers. I passed technical interview and also pair coding. Then I got rejected because I have been told that I was not senior enough. I can totally understand this. But the questions during technical interview were like that: Which design patterns do you know? Difference between HashMap and HashTable? How do you test? The most senior question which was asked to me was how zookeeper works internally. But strangely enough, there were no questions about big data, system design, distributed systems, techs like kafka, docker, spark etc. So my coding challenge, technical interview and pair coding went well. But suddenly they decided I am not senior. And they suggested me another project with another team. I could have accepted this as well but the contract was one year limited. So I just accepted another offer from another company. But then what I learned is this limited contract was a company policy. They said they could have changed it but it was too late. There were some communication problems between me and the company. I think if they want to understand that the candidate is either senior or not, technical interviews must be really tough. And people who are making interview should be also senior when they want to hire a developer. Because whenever I replied a question, technical guys were totally OK with my answer. They just approved my questions. It was a bit obvious that during the technical interview, they were reading questions on the screen :) But there were no answers I suppose. Because I mistakenly replied one question as wrong but they said it was correct. I just realized that it was wrong after I gave the answer. I guess I have been rejected from the first position by a PM guy who has no technical background. This is also strange :) But the good thing is when I said that I have another offer from another company, they just made the interview process faster.