When i got hired by Pivotal Labs, i had: 1. A phone conversation with a manager to see if we were on the same page. 2. A one-hour on-site coding test, writing

When i got hired by Pivotal Labs, i had: 1. A phone conversation with a manager to see if we were on the same page. 2. A one-hour on-site coding test, writing a fairly simple class using very strict TDD (i think we did this in the evening, after my day at my previous job had finished). 3. A whole day on site, spending each half of the day pairing with someone on something. In the morning we wrote a little demo app for using Redis on Cloud Foundry (in Ruby, which i didn't know!), and in the afternoon it was some made-up webapp (using Spring, which i also didn't know). Both things either were or were very like real development (on the Spring thing, we spent half an hour setting up the environment, fifteen minutes coding, then two hours debugging and reading Spring docs to find out why it wasn't working, so exactly like real Spring development). The first two stages were pretty undemanding, which was good for me. The final stage took a lot of time and energy, but i got to spend the whole day with two current employees, both of whom really impressed me (shouts out to Chris B and Nick S), and that was really good for me. In general, i really like to be given a stringent interview, because it indicates i'll be working with high-calibre people who have passed it. But it does have to be effective in its stringency, not just unpleasant. Amazon Instant Video's hiring process was the latter (and not just because it took a whole day with no break for lunch).