There's a lot of material out there about terrible job interviews and interview processes. So let us flip the script: is there a job interview you enjoyed or fondly think back on?
Everything is fair game here, whether it was the process, the setting, the people, the format, a particular question that was asked or anything else that made this interview stand out to you in a positive manner. It doesn't have to be limited to getting a job in tech either.
First round, I had to do 2 coding questions in an hour, 30 mins for each question. I had to go to their campus. They would give me a laptop/environment of my choice and then time starts. Questions were very easy, so the expectation was reasonable.
Second round on On-site was two interviews: Director of engineering asked me why certain piece of C code was behaving in a certain way. I could not answer, but we compiled the code into Assembly and tried to understand the behavior. An hour later, the CTO of the company, Ken Duda, walked in and he asked me an Object Oriented question and some of my past projects. Really drilled me. He gave very simple design of same projects. Very educative and amazed to see a brilliant mind at work. The interview was in no way condescending.
They took a decision right there and it was a no hire. But I loved the experience. It was no BS interview.
P.S. We are hiring.
It all felt comfortable and not "quizzy". I didn't get the job, but I got back a lot of very specific and encouraging feedback that really inspired me in my career, and I will be forever grateful.
My takeaway was, treat candidates as people that deserve respect and time, rather than churning through them.
Then I got put on a crash course of Solaris and vim (with the mentorship of a literal UNIX greybeard) and sent fixing bugs at customers' sites. One month later another young colleague and I were sent to teach the basics of Linux networking to a class of enlisted recruits in the Italian Army. Quite the experience, and highly reckless strategy for a consulting company, but you tend to learn pretty quickly if you're eager to.
The hoops I gotta go through 16 years later to get a consulting gig are just ridiculous.
Trial by fire with the appropriate subject matter experts standing by is a great way to quickly broaden the broader talent pool in a sustainable way, while turning a profit on the free hands-on training being afforded to the new blood.
In a traditional organization you aren't afforded the sheer variability in deployments or pace of work afforded by consulting, so hiring someone completely green usually isn't the best exchange, even if the in-house expertise is available to provide the proper mentorship.
Maybe this is just me wishing I had a similar opportunity (or even just mentorship) but I would love to see this as more commonplace.
First, the interviewer was very supportive and cooperative, it felt almost like a friendly talk between two colleagues. He did not try to outsmart me or catch on some tricky detail.
Also, the questions were very good - we discussed how to build a distributed data processing system, a very relevant and on the right level for the position I applied (Engineering Manager).
It was all very high stress with questions and answers going back and forth. There was a long pause which was broken by one of the engineers asking: "Do you drink beer?"
I didn't get the job.