After seriously interviewing with seven companies, I feel that I can pretty well generalize the process for big and small companies looking to hire entry-level software engineers/programmers/designers. I’m interested in hearing how strange it sounds to you teacher-types and others out there.

Unless you have an inside-track recommendation, the screening process comes first. You first talk for a half hour, and basically do a fizzbuzz style problem. After the first one, in which I was a bit nervous and rusty, they were rather laughable. I guess it’s to screen out those worst 199 people that go around applying for jobs everywhere, I dunno. A slightly longer, 45min-1hour conversation with a different person is the next follow-up. I noticed those tended to dig a bit more into using theoretical questions based upon data structure usage and algorithmic complexity. Know when to use hash tables and trees, and know your Big-O notation!

After 2 phone screens, possibly 3, comes the invitation to an in-person interviewing day. (The exception to this was Google, who completely skipped the screens after learning I was in town and already had offers. Even big companies like to avoid paying airfare.) I was never screened out by any company, but again I think that just indicates competence rather than brilliance. Microsoft was the only one that helped with airfare: the rest carefully avoided mentioning it, and of course I wasn’t going to bring it up.

Technical interviews, unless you have a more incremental process, are basically a full day made up of 4-7 mini-interview sessions. This was where the small/big company dichotomy really showed itself. SchoolSoft’s founder and CEO treated Becky and I to a nice dinner. At Tableau, I had lunch with the VP Eng (who’s PhD thesis the company was built on) and also talked with the CEO. At the small startups, you do 6+ sessions, often in teams of two, and really get to feel like you’ve met the whole core of the team. At Microsoft, I met individually with 4 people (2 in each of 2 teams), with taxi service between buildings. Same concept, but much more mechanized and stripped down.

Mini-interviews? Yeah, each hour is a different session. A good interviewing team will coordinate to divide up the focus areas / questions. A typical hour will be 5 minutes small-talk, 45 minutes of programming/design questions (typically 1-3 things), and 10 minutes of Q&A in the opposite direction.

Becky thought it was weird that no one talks about money, even the recruiter that coordinate your interview at large companies. The American money taboo is part of that, I think – but then, teacher salaries are completely standardized and published, in contrast. It’s most likely that the well-known high variability in programmer ability combines with the very subjective valuation of a person by a company to make it rather pointless to discuss money until the full interviewing team has come to its overall conclusion. I didn’t mind: my search wasn’t about money, but so much more about the mission/opportunities/team, so I was glad to avoid worrying about negotiating.

I definitely found myself gravitating towards the small start-ups during my search. In addition, Talyst and Intelius felt more like they were “about the money”, while SchoolSoft and Tableau (and Vulcan and Google, in their ways) were more “about the mission”. Eh, this is getting long. Do any other fields take interviewing for entry-level jobs more seriously? I was usually exhausted at 4pm after 6 intense sessions…