First interview is pretty straight-forward - they tell about the company and let me ask generic questions, then I was provided with a set of DB design related tasks and a small project to implement in a back-end language of choice using their laptop. Takes around 2 hours. Not hard to solve and it provides them with a good idea of candidate's DB and programming knowledge.
My second interview was a different story. I was welcomed by a random employee and asked to take a sit and wait for my interviewer in the kitchen. Then another employee appeared, and while making himself a cup of coffee said "a cake?" without turning around. Well I thought it's just another semi-nice guy knowing that I'm waiting for an interviewer tries to help me pass the waiting process easier, I guess I'd do something similar. I said I'm not hungry and started a small talk with him. As it turned out he was my interviewer - what? "...did you just come in the kitchen knowing that I came here to meet you and you don't even greet me and ask me whether I want a cake without looking at me?...", I thought. OK, I put it all aside and followed him.
Once we settled in the meeting room I was asked to tell about myself and then to draw a brief database design UML of one of my projects on the whiteboard. Not the most pleasant experience as the person I was drawing it for clearly had experience only with small to medium projects and only RoR ones and had no idea how DB design scales in the wild. However, I guess I did my best there despite the bad experience since I met him. What happened next was the end of an interview though. I was asked to write pseudo-code of a function that returns number of ways one can climb n stairs on a whiteboard. It was enough. I refused to do it. Honestly, I believe the interviewer just copied it from Google interview questions book in order to enjoy watching poor people struggling with it using a marker and a whiteboard while he sits back, really :) I'd do that on Google interview, but I'd know what I'm fighting for. Here, I've done enough for them to know a lot about my experience and capabilities and now I'm asked by an unmannered kid to recall Fibonacci out of my head and to solve this boring riddle that has nothing in common with daily challenges I solve.
