Phone screen: 1 hour.

This was a technical programming problem administered in a language of my choice via CoderPad. I chose Ruby, which probably earned me bonus points, but definitely choose your strongest language if it's not Ruby. I also opted to use TDD during all my coding interviews, which I believe helped impress them.

"Life story": 1/2 hour.

They stated they were very proud of this step, but I felt it was quite pointless. The person administering the interview was not technical, so my story of my development career was pretty much lost on them.

Interviews: 1/2 hour setup time, 1 hour with a senior dev, 1 hour with a different senior dev, 1/2 hour break, and 1 hour with a mid-level dev. (I had requested this be split over 2 days, but that request was lost in the shuffle.) No more Coderpad for these; I used my preferred editor and screen shared. Again, the focus was pure Ruby, with no obscure algorithms.

The second of the above interviews was not a coding session but a "technical deep dive." I was asked to go into as much detail as I could on 1-2 projects I had worked on in the past. I prepared a third project just in case and was glad I did, as I needed it to fill the allotted time.

Every interviewer was super-friendly; the experience was much more collaborative than adversarial. A couple of times, I received nudges that didn't give away a solution but definitely saved me from getting off-track.

If there was one weakness, I would say it was the lack of Rails experience. My Ruby skills are really solid, but I'm still quite weak with ActiveRecord, SQL, and JavaScript. I think they perceived me as a rockstar, when in reality, their interviews only tested my strongest skill.

Before making an offer, they require a reference from a previous co-worker (within the last 5 years) and a previous manager. Hope you haven't been burning bridges!

I had to create a class that required strong knowledge of my preferred programming language's data structures, and how to use them efficiently.