I recently finished spending a couple weeks doing the interview dance for a mobile application developer position at Capital One’s flagship “Cafe” office in downtown San Francisco and figured it would be good to recap my experiences for the next guy who comes down the interview pipeline. In addition to just being another “big bank” (or big bank wanna-be), one of C1’s initiatives is to try to come up with products & services that drive customer “engagement” (that is to say, active usage and churning within the customer’s various Capital One accounts). There are two mobile apps actively in development, apparently related to “shopping” and “travel” (the first one has been in development for at least two years and the second is a much newer product; neither of these apps is on the app store and I wasn’t given the opportunity to see a demo of these apps). There’s also some third consumer-facing mobile app on a white board somewhere. So this is why Capital One is actively trying to land mobile developers. In the San Francisco office there’s at least two or three product managers plus a PM boss, and at least two or three mobile developers per platform and an engineering boss. I didn’t get a close look at the office environment, but the office area (which takes up the the third and fourth floors of the building) is not nearly as big as the much more impressive ground and 2nd floors that the general public is welcome to visit. The interview room was very small, with a modern looking steel barn door and walls that doubled as white boards. There’s a fully stocked fridge next to the interview room and bottled water and soft drinks in the fridge. The interview process started with phone conversations with two PM’s, who were exceedingly friendly. I also got to speak with the engineering boss on the phone who certainly seemed nice enough. After three or four phone interviews I was invited in to do half hour interviews with three different people: one of the PM’s I had talked to on the phone, the PM boss (who kept a strange poker-player unreadable face the entire time I spoke with him and seemed impossible to get a sense of whether or not he was skeptical of me or if he was just being awkwardly friendly). The last guy was a developer and it’s there I ran into trouble. So about the two mobile developers I spoke with, I wasn’t very impressed with these potential direct co-engineers. The first one I spoke with (on the phone) asked me a number of technical questions that I felt good about the answers, but as a homework assignment he gave me two different programming problems to solve — including one full blown compiling and functional mobile app — **within 30 minutes** in total for both together. I’m a little bit more experienced than the average candidate so I did deliver both solutions within that 30 minute deadline (with a couple algorithm adjustments that I sent in a follow up e-mail a few minutes after the deadline had passed). I’ve done plenty of small programming projects and homework assignments for job interviews before, but this was the first time I’ve been told to code up multiple answers with such a short deadline, and I think this would be a somewhat stressful challenge for the average developer. Here are the two problems he had me code up: 1) write up an algorithm that reverses a linked list (this is a standard algorithm question any engineer of any experience level should expect) and 2) write an app that displays one of multiple pictures and add swipe gestures to the picture, swapping pictures when one is swiped off screen. During the in-person interview visit, I got to speak with the second mobile developer. He blasted me with a few deep programming language questions and to my dismay, didn’t seem particularly pleased with any answers I was giving back to him. He had me design out a 2-3 screen shopping app, describing the architecture and the classes I’d use to assemble the thing, and this is where I pulled out the marker to do some drawing on the white board. He still didn’t seem impressed with my descriptions of things (and it may have been that he wasn’t explaining his question well — or more likely — what he was really looking for in the answers he wanted to hear from me). In retrospect I walked out of there thinking he may have been purposely trying to agitate me to see how I’d work well under pressure, and so if I had to guess why I flunked the interview process, this guy (who was not an employee but instead a contractor) would be the veto on me going forward. Definitely not a friendly or welcoming culture fit. But hopefully my experience flunking the Capital One interview will help you to prepare to pass your interviewing day. If you find any of the information in my interview review helpful, please let me know by voting "Yes" on the "Helpful?" question below (this helps to motivate me to be as detailed as possible).