Lengthy phone screening with HR rep. She asked many questions about work history.
Afterwards she asked me to write up a description about an interesting software project I've worked on, so she could give it to the engineering staff. This was a strange request.
Two weeks later they invited me to an on-site interview. It took about three hours. Consisted of a panel interview with software engineers who inquired about my background, and asked me to describe an approach for an autonomous robot path finding problem. Also asked me to fulfill a paired programming / test-driven development exercise in Java. Implement a random access container backed by a singly linked list, supporting the following operations:
- insert
- remove
- clear
- contains
- reverse
I completed it in about an hour. They told me that I was the first person they interviewed in the past year to successfully finish it.
They invited me to a second on-site a week later. This time they asked me to prepare a half hour power point presentation about a technical topic. I delivered my presentation to a group of eight software engineers. It was well received.
Afterwards, I met with two artificial intelligence specialists who asked me to design a robot mission control system on the white board. This was a fun exercise. But it seemed redundant, because it was too similar to a white board exercise I did during the first interview.
After that I met with the COO and one of the technical business area managers. They asked about my project management capabilities, and if I had any experience managing outside contractors. I felt this was way outside of the scope of the software engineering role they brought me in for. This led me to believe that they were wasting my time by making me go through the motions of their lengthy interview process when they haven't figured-out what type of person they need.
