I applied online. I interviewed at Sonoma Technology
Interview
While I didn't get the offer, the people at STI are great, and I learned a lot from my interview experience. It is a bit of a gauntlet, though.
Reached out to them over email, had a brief phone screen with HR/Talent Acquisition.
Then had a an hour video interview with a couple members of the software team. More so of a resume deep dive, asking questions about the technology used.
Then, final round. 3-4 hours. Starts with an intro/schedule for the day, you're bouncing around zoom calls with various parts of the team for the rest of the day.
Next is describe in detail a project you've worked on.
Then, talk to the network guy. Not very technical, really nice guy.
Then, a white-boarding/coding challenge. Leetcode easy, but I was overthinking it the whole time.
Next, OOP. Go over various aspect of OOP, Data Structures, Algos, etc.
Finally, meet with C-level employee. Totally casual, easy to talk to.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Sonoma Technology
Interview
Talk about yourself and answer some technical questions. Interview itself was alright but they took three weeks to respond after. Overall felt like a big waste of time, should've had a response much sooner.
The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Sonoma Technology in Jul 2011
Interview
All day interview. Met with at least eight separate groups in sequence, passed off each time by HR person. Asked largely the same questions each time. Earlier, "asked" to attend an impromptu dinner following eight or so hours of being on point. During the day, staff generally cool in approach and questions. I liked most everyone, but many alluded to schism between scientist and developers, leadership-staff. Second group, I had to debug and hand code some relatively simple Java and without an IDE (I got it right), then, explain what was going on (this wasn't as easy to do so quickly without a few minutes to look it over). To the same group, had to defend code sample that, while not super clean, works and was OK given the circumstances under which it had been written. They were a bit snotty about my work. Upper management pretty self-absorbed and like to lecture you on their achievements in the same way professors do to their grad students. Senior admin staff (HR, operations) also pretty condescending. If you go, check out UK Queen theme in one office, it's pretty incongruous and makes the experience somewhat surreal...Dinner a waste, too personal at that point and not really fair, as in "what's this guy like after hours". I had hoped to be taken seriously by these people - I'm not a fabulous developer but have solid experience, science background and work hard - but I think they passed me over because of my general up-front, no-bs approach, my age, and family situation. Read: Don't be too forthcoming, do your best to be a door mat and you'll be fine.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Asked to explain details of particular java exception without having five minutes to think it through.