The process was very strange. For the first 'interview,' they had me take a written test on campus. The test consisted mostly of 'IQ test'-type logic questions such as "banana = 6, pear = 4, what does lemon equal?", which anyone with an ounce of common sense knows are useless for telling if somebody will make a good software developer or not, or even for telling if somebody is smart or not. They also asked for my SAT scores... who cares about IQ and SAT scores? Anyone who's smart knows that intelligence isn't a number; it's the passion and drive to accomplish actual accomplishments in an effective way.

There was also a programming section of the test, which consisted entirely of dynamic programming questions. This was the only 'technical interview' I had to do -- their assessment of me as a programmer was based entirely on how well I knew this one algorithms technique. Dynamic programming is certainly a good thing to know, but it's honestly not that relevant to most of software engineering. There are more important skills to test, such as object-oriented design principles, technical communication skills, the ability to gauge the running time of an algorithm, and the ability to think outside the box, to name a few. Dynamic programming is something you're supposed to throw into an interview to spice things up, not to use as a base for the whole process. They at no point had a human being ask me technical questions to gauge my ability. This is a huge red flag: If the company cares so little about testing the quality of new hires, it's a very bad sign about the quality of employees working there.

The onsite was also really weird. It consisted mostly of a tour of their very pretty office building and of the company treating me to fancy dinners at nice restaurants in Madison. At no point was the work that they do there really discussed. I was given the chance to talk to an engineer, but all he told me was that 75% of the company uses Visual Basic (eew), 25% of the company uses C#, and that the company was moving in the direction of "web stuff." That doesn't tell me anything about what kinds of problems the employees there solve. Their product demo was given by a self-described "UI programmer"—it had a horrible UI from the '90s. I had a feeling the whole time that they were buttering me up to take some sort of plunge, rather than opening up an honest dialogue about what the position is like and why I should or shouldn't want to take it.

The corporate culture also seemed to be very stuffy and arrogant. Everyone kept talking about how "smart" the employees were, and about how profitable the company was, without ever discussing any achievements that actually matter: interesting technical challenges overcome, products that solved problems other companies did not solve, taking good care of their employees, that kind of thing. The company's motto is "Work Hard. Have Fun. Make Money." That's the only thing I felt that they cared about: having a "fun" office building, being profitable, and working their employees too hard (just read the reviews, especially for non-programming positions).

The dynamic programming questions would have been hard if I didn't know dynamic programming.