There were 1 or 2 preliminary interviews (there must have been a second, but I don't recall many details about it). After that I got invited for an onsite. This review is about that. There were four interviewers:
The first, with a dev. This was pleasant, conversational, and not too challenging
The second, with a manager. He drew out an application architecture on the whiteboard and asked me how I would go about testing it. I felt like the question was too broad and I had a hard time answering it.
The third, with a test dev. She gave me typical whiteboard problems, which were fine although I was feeling a little discouraged after the previous interviewer.
The fourth, with another manager. We started making small talk / typical generic interview questions and then she asked me a question I found pretty bizarre. It was basically a series of hypothetical situations in which I gradually got more work piled on me, and the prompt "what would you do then?".
To paraphrase:
interviewer: "you have a 10 day project, how do you manage your time?"
me: "I consult with peers, work iteratively, etc"
interviewer: "halfway through you get another project, what now?"
me: "i balance time between projects, etc"
interviewer: "it's friday, you're behind, and everything's due monday. what now?"
at which point I broke out of character in this little role play. I don't remember exactly what I said,
but it was something along the lines of "you seem to be implying that it's expected to work on the
weekends. Is this true? How long do people work here?"
To which she responded: "it depends, but it's silicon valley, so most everyone works more than 40 hours"
To which I respond: "not true, many companies work 40 hour weeks."
Yeah, so you get the idea, that last interviewer really didn't go well at all. She probably thinks I'm some
communist agitator.
