A friend of mine submitted my resume to a hiring manager and I got a phone call about a week later to set up a phone interview. The phone interview involved two different people, both of whom went straight into the technical questioning. There was none of the typical interview banter or "what's your greatest weakness" sort of vagueness. The second guy didn't even have inflection in his voice. He was just a cold, hard, questioning robot... creepy!
About halfway through the phone call I was asked to sit down at my computer and log on to a website where the interviewer watched me write some code to solve a problem he'd specified (printing a series of numbers to a console in a spiral pattern). It was a bit difficult since every time I stopped to think he'd ask me what I was thinking. After several minutes of thinking out loud and typing nervously I managed to complete the problem.
After the online portion of the interview, I was given homework (see "Most Difficult or Unexpected Question"), and told to submit it to them by the end of the day! I had a hot date with tickets to a show that evening, but as the hours went by it became clear that I was going to have to cancel to work on the interview problem. Frustrated and bitter, I resigned to submit what I had by midnight along with documentation on the missing aspects of my solution.
A few days went by and I heard nothing. I still had some questions about the internship that I didn't have a chance to ask over the phone, so I e-mailed my recruiter. She replied the next day with a form letter telling me that they'd decided to pursue other candidates.
