World Wide Technology interview questions

I received an email inviting me to submit a resume, and shortly thereafter got offered a phone interview. A few days later I was invited to come to Asynchrony's Springfield office for an in-person interview. The interview lasted about three hours, and consisted of two main parts. In the first, I was interviewed by two of the more senior developers, who asked me a variety of questions about my experience and software development in general, as well as giving me a detailed explanation of how development works at Asynchrony. The second part consisted of a paired-programming session, which involved solving a rather simple but interesting puzzle, presumably to see how I did in pairing and to verify I wasn't just blowing smoke. Think code golf without the golf. I also got a feel during this time for what sort of coding style they prefer to work with, etc.

I submitted my resume through a friend. The next day I got a call from their HR department. We talked briefly about my experience. I then received two word documents with pre-screening questions covering why I was interested in the company, my experience and my interests. After that, a 30min phone interview was scheduled. This was a pretty laid back discussion about the environment at Asynchrony Labs and what I was interested in doing. I think the sole purpose of that interview was to find out how I felt about paired programming all day every day. If you aren’t interested in pairing all day everyday, then this place is not for you! Next, I received a request for a face to face interview. The face to face is the main event. Mine was 2.5 hours long. The first part was a discussion about me, my experience, etc; as well as sometime for me to ask them questions. There were two people in the room. One had a laptop and I'm pretty sure she was googling technical interview questions to ask me. She was staring at it a lot. It was unclear to me if she was actually listening to what I had to say or if she was just trying to figure out the next question she was going to ask me. Lastly, I was given a paired-programming exercise. I was a bit confused by this because in true paired programming both pairs write code, but for obvious reasons, they aren't going to solve any of the problems for you. It should really be just called a coding test. The exercise is test driven, but you don't have to write any tests. You are given a set of classes and a set of tests, and you have to implement code to get the tests to pass. You are only given one test at a time and your task is to read the code of the test to figure out what code you need to implement in the classes to get the code to pass. There is an open dialogue going the whole time and you can ask questions and most definitely you should talk through what your approach is and how to solve the problem before you code the solution. We ran into some weird technical difficulties during the exercise that derailed and flustered me but the pair was very apologetic and very helpful throughout the whole experience.