The interview process consisted of an initial call with a recruiter and a phone call meeting with four web developers. The call was a half hour and involved discussing my skills and how I would handle certain situations, to get an idea of where my skills were at. After that, they had me speak to two more developers using http://collabedit.com for live coding sessions, which enabled them to see me code what they asked me to.

I first had to develop a small widget with basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, demonstrating how I would approach it. The third developer had me create a function for adding a class in JavaScript, given an element or ID string, and the class string to add. He was looking to see if I understood the DOM and the use of NodeType for checking if an element or string was being passed and how to add the class to the className.

The fourth developer, a senior web developer, asked me questions about prototypal inheritance and the prototype chain. He also asked me to create a function that would flatten an associative array into a single array, which was quite an involved question. He had asked me to create the addClass function, which I mentioned I had done for the previous developer and could send him the code for.

I was told later, when following up, that they had decided to pass. I received a message from the senior developer with feedback for the addClass function I sent him, which he had several concerns about. I was aware of all the issues he stated and wasn't expecting such a harsh response. When I wrote the code, I wasn't under the impression that I had to create a fully working function on the spot, but it apparently was what the senior developer was expecting, and his decision to not hire me was based on that. Unfortunately, he did not allow me to produce a revised version, which I had done and which addressed all his concerns and some he had not mentioned in full. He never responded to me about any issues with that version.

It wasn't that the questions were hard, so much as how involved the addClass and array flattening questions were. Given it was for an interview and the expectations were very high for creating a working function of each, JavaScript's quirks made answering these questions harder. More needed to be considered when developing solutions for them.