The hiring process was almost same as stated by other candidates. One simple on-campus (at the university) written test : having logical questions and a pseudo code for finding prime no.'s, followed by an hour interview: discussing basic technical skills and some educational background questions.
Another round consisted of an on-site (at one of the Fast's office) interview, for which they paid the air fare and hotel charges for one night. The interview lasted for 2 hours. Consisted of many more team based and behavioral questions. There was a through discussion about the company's hierarchy and organization structure. Then came some typical technical questions e.g. difference between call by value/call by reference, types of joins in SQL, How would you do a code review?, How would you get to know that a SQL query is efficient or not?, Why OOPS run faster than C? etc. There after, it was a round of some puzzles. Was asked two puzzles, One related to sorting of socks and another related to placing of numbers in a tic-tac-toe grid. Got the exact answer for the first one and tried to thought mathematically for the second & caught in between!
The whole 2 hours were well spent, I would say I could answer almost every question right. They really appreciated the thought process I applied for solving both the puzzles. Was asked about salary expectation in the end, time of availability, willingness for relocation. Note that, I am an international student, so there were many questions about the immigration status. Had some friends who were not permanent residents or could not afford to have a work permit for a longer period, got refusal in the first stage itself.
The interview ended by being told that you will soon hear from us and if you get any other offer in between, plz let us know beforehand.
Soon after got a refusal letter.
The best part: I wrote back to my interviewer and asked for the detailed feedback for no offer. She shared some fruitful insights and place most importance to the problem solving part. Despite giving the answers correct, they found it more academically oriented rather than the one used in their work place.
Hence, I concluded that being v. strong in academics and using CS algos etc. for problem solving could be a negative factor.
It was one the best professionally managed and transparent interview process I have undergone!