Phone screen was simple with standard about us / about you / interest in the company. Second interview was a video chat with an individual whom needed better interviewing skills. Very uninterested with what I had to say about my experiences. The individual couldn't comprehend my responses to the Q&A if I didn't provide the exact word(s) that he must have copied from google. After multiple eye rolls and asking me to rephrase my answer to something that matched his sheet, the interview ended abruptly without explanation. I'm glad I wasn't offered a position after this experience but I fear the company will continue having a hard time finding good fit without some oversight from a more experienced engineer in the interview process.

I applied for the position online with an inside referral from a friend, but heard nothing back for about a month. At that point my friend invited me in purely informally just to see the office and meet the team for lunch. During that visit I connected with the VP of Engineering/hiring manager for this particular role in-person and let him know that I was interested in joining the team and that I had applied online. I got an email about a week later inviting me back into the office for a more formal 4.5-hour series of interviews (my guess is there would normally have been a phone screen before this, but since I spoke with the hiring manager directly the week prior, I'd bet they decided to skip that step). The first half-hour was a tour of the office and an explanation of the company's various departments. The next four hours were a series of hour-long interviews, two technical and two non-technical. The first hour was a non-technical lunch discussion with the VP of Engineering to talk more about my qualifications and the role in question. It was nothing particularly scary and went smoothly. That interview was followed by an hour of technical questions with two of the company's developers--mostly pseudo-coding on a whiteboard--where I was quizzed on my knowledge of Ruby on Rails and relational database design. The questions started easy (how would I iterate through an array of integers and print each of them to the console one at a time), and got progressively harder as the interview went on. I was also asked a series of non-technical questions intended to expose my communication style and ability to explain detailed/technical information to someone less knowledgeable on the subject. The third hour was pair-programming--with two different developers--in which I was asked to code a basic front-end game using JavaScript and jQuery. I was allowed to turn to them and/or the internet with questions if I got stuck, but was expected to do all the coding myself and explain my strategy for designing the game as I built it. Pro-tip: DON'T GOOGLE FOR A TUTORIAL. That defeats the purpose of the exercise and will pretty much disqualify you. The one red flag I noticed in the overall process happened during this hour: The exercise was supposed to be emailed to me in advance so I could be prepared for it, but it wasn't, so they had to give it to me on the spot. I think they took that into account as we paired, though, and in the end that probably made it a better test of my ability to think on my feet and problem-solve than if I had had a couple days to prep in advance. The final hour was with an Engineering Manager, and was for the most part non-technical. It centered around my coding philosophies and processes, and ended up being more of a two-way discussion on the company's project management style and team structure. I enjoyed the conversation and it was very low stress. I sent hand-written thank you notes to each of my interviewers after it was over, and received an offer two-and-a-half weeks later (after one or two follow-ups to the company's HR team).