Applied online by responding to a consulting (placement) company ad. An IBM lead interviewed me over the phone, and the placement company arranged for an F2F interview. The interview was conducted by two individuals: one lead and another developer, I believe. It was a whiteboard and question marathon. I was asked to write an SQL query by being given a database table on the whiteboard.

This was not difficult but unexpected to write the entire query on the whiteboard. There is a table with Product ID, Product Desc, Customer ID, and price, etc. Product ID is the primary key, and I was asked to write a SQL query to get the results of the first 30 or more product IDs, Product Desc, and Customer ID for a particular Product ID.