At Evernote: 1) Peer presentation - talk about past project 2) System design - design at the high level 3) Debugging - given a failing test fix the code so t

At Evernote: 1) Peer presentation - talk about past project 2) System design - design at the high level 3) Debugging - given a failing test fix the code so the test passes. 4) Coding - Straight forward problem to code and create. For the peer presentation, we are expecting the candidate to be prepared. They have lots of notice about this portion of the interview. We want them to be articulate and clear about the technical problems, project management problems and unexpected issues. System design - we come up with a sample issue that is easy to articulate quickly. For example, "we are going to design the first version of Wordpress". We then ask questions and extend the problem during the interview. Debugging - we give them a random open source project and we break one of the unit tests. We then ask the developer to track down and fix the issue. Coding - smaller scale than the System design question but focused on determining if the candidate can construct a small program end to end. So this is not a portion-of-a-program, but rather construct a quick command line program to do X. For junior people we drop the peer presentation and add additional coding questions. -------- I liked this interview the best of all the places I interviewed. There was no "gotcha" and the problems I was asked were relevant to Evernote's business. Walking out I didn't feel like I did the best I should have, (I have high standards) but I felt the problems were incredibly fair. Now that I am at Evernote, hands down where interviews go badly are in the debugging section. The peer presentation shows people who have not thought about the "why" behind their coding / design decisions - and it separates the juniors from the seniors. Lastly, we expect and can demand a far higher interview performance because we tell candidates how to prepare. If they don't prepare, it shows soooo painfully. For candidates that do prepare we can have a more interesting and engaging interview that allows us to sell Evernote as a company.