Sonoma Partners .NET Developer interview questions

Most of the ten or so interviews I have gone on in the past few months have been pretty straight forward. They all usually begin with an online test, phone call, followed by a simple personal interview. Sonoma Partners has been the only exception to this. Sonoma seems to be a very cultivated place when it comes to their culture and perhaps is the reason why their interview process is so different and involved. My experience with their interview was all in all great but ended with a "cliff hanger" of sorts. I will divide this review into paragraphs, each one being a part of the interview process. The first part to their interview process is a simple phone call and completion of a C# proficiency test online. I can't remember the exact site that was used but it was your usual programming test. E.G. What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface etc. It is timed and there are also some workflow questions where you have to follow along by eye and choose the correct output. All in all it was fairly simple. The second part of the interview process involved another phone call with one of the senior developers. He explained what the company did, their benefits, and asked me a few questions. After the short intro I was told to follow a dotnetfiddle link so that I can code while he watched. He was very easy going, down to earth, and willing to help you along the way. I believe the problem I had to fix had to do something with ordering datetimes and was not too difficult. The first problem he presented me with made use of the C# Tuple class which I had never seen before. He tried explaining it but eventually gave me another problem. Apparently I wasn't the first to complain about the tuple. The third part to the interview process was another coding test. This time I was sent a project in which I had to provide implementation to solve four different problems. The problems are as follows : 1) Find the Nth Prime 2) Make a method to return a boolean indicating if a set of input dates overlapped 3.) Find the needle in the haystack (an array of strings (haystack) an array of strings (needle)) 4) Build a tree view in code using a dataset that is set for you already. They gave me a week to do it but I turned it in three days later. For the fourth part I was told that the senior developer really liked me and that I did great on my tests. They asked me to come in for an almost 4 hour face to face interview process. I went in and first met with the VP of development who was very laid back and young. He almost gave me the vibe of a California surfboarder. He asked me to go over my resume and also tell him what my interests and hobbies were. The second part of this interview was with two senior developers. They had me write out pseudo code on how I would go about creating the structure of a checkers game. After that they had me try and implement it in code. I did not finish but they told me that no one ever finishes, it's just meant to see how you think when you code. Both of the developers were pretty cool although they were a lot less down to earth than the VP of development. The third part to this interview was with the principle of development. This guy was just like the VP of development, very down to earth and easy going. We basically talked about my resume and he went through a list of programming concepts and technologies asking me if I knew each one or not. The final part of this interview was with the HR lady. She didn't seem as down to earth as the VP and Principle but she was more down to earth than the two senior developers. She asked me your average job applicant personality type questions. This was followed by a wonderlic test which they said they don't really use. After the interview the VP, one of the senior devs, and the HR lady treated me to lunch. I emailed the HR lady two days later thanking them for the lunch and apologizing for not saying it earlier as I get anxious on interviews. She responded with the same email that many of the other reviews spoke about. It was robotic and definitely scripted. It did not address my previous email at all and simply said they were pursuing other candidates. All in all I would say that they are looking for "gen Yers" fresh out of college. I myself am 25 with 4.5 years experience in .net but do not have my college degree. I shared highshools with the HR lady and thought that had scored me some points but it did not. They really like the culture they have there. (I don't blame them) It seems like a really amazing place to work at. I did not see every single employee but from the employees I did see they all seemed to fit the mid 20's Caucasian profile. Some even looked like Hipsters. It is a very young company.