I had a good general experience with my interview. Got called by a recruiter and later had a small phone interview with two of them at separate times. After that they sent me a cultural index form which is quick to fill out simple questions with checkboxes. Next they sent out a programming task to complete, I was given a few requirements and starting templates for implementing a program using SQL, XML and general coding (I did mine using Java). It did take some time, and that’s ok in my mind, this is where you can show that you know what you are doing to the company. Then I had a phone interview where I was asked general and programming specific questions, pretty standard questions I think. I then got called for the in person interview, which started with the development manager and was general in nature (talk about what you have done before and so on). That was followed by a group interview with developers (2 dev, 1 qa, plus the dev manager) It started out with talking about the design of the programming task and continued on with general programming questions (Java, Sql and such) it was detailed and more extensive than a lot of other interviews I’ve been to over the years, but completely reasonable with good questions. There were probably some questions in there I didn’t know, to those I just said I don’t know, and that was fine. (In my opinion it’s better to admit not knowing instead of plain out guessing, if you claim to know something and explain it totally wrong I’d question what else the things you say you know is really worth.) The next step was another group interview, I was talking to 3 other developers about general chit chat, nothing technical here. After that I met with the CTO and the develop manager and we talked about general things about me and the company, and I got a good feeling about the company’s mission statement and how it’s run when doing that. Shortly after that I got the go ahead call and I decided to join the team…

Ridiculous interview process. Company employees seems unable to coordinate among themselves. First - An on-line personality assessment. Second - Two phone interviews, the second interviewer was unaware of the first interview. Third - In your free time, write a Java program to read an XML file and persist data to three provided database tables. Only requirement was to be able to process the file twice without creating duplicate records. Instructions specifically stating: *Use any technology you want*. Finally - An in-person interview which includes review of your program. The reviewer claimed my program didn't run. Then, the reviewer tried it in front of me - using the provided simple instructions - it worked as described. The reviewer had not heard of the technology I used (Google uses it ...) and didn't understand it. The questions about it were condescending and almost accusatory. Remember, they said "use any technology you want". The company's Java stack is the predictable, unimaginative, follow-the-crowd collection: Spring, Hibernate and the pedestrian IDE Eclipse. This company does not have a good track record in picking technology. They wrote their first UI in Flex - who thought that was a good idea? And now, they have chosen another market loser, Ember, as the new MVVM framework.