I'm a self-taught junior guy. Had all of 2 months experience when the recruiter reached out to me (I didn't apply). Said they were offering only $20-25/hr. Very personable guy, moved on to a phone screen with him (he is however non-technical so he just wrote down my answers) and felt I did pretty well. Classes/OOP, what's an abstract class, an override, polymorphism, WCF services, threading, etc. Didn't know everything but got a lot of the questions pretty solidly. Some general programming stuff, some specific domain knowledge.
I read the reviews here on Glassdoor and was VERY wary going in, but hey, I'm just getting started in the industry, why not give it a shot?
Moved on to an interview. Was told I would be doing a "simple test" just printing out some text for the first stage. I laughed when I got there. "We're doing fizzbuzz, aren't we?". Yep, fizzbuzz. Recruiter watched me implement it, literally jotted down the time taken on a piece of paper, then they brought in two guys, one a technical lead type and the other a manager. Did a test where you debug a broken web application; you keep hitting "run" and it keeps breaking and you try to fix it. Breezed through the first parts but stumbled on the later ones. Didn't expect to do great, did have only 2mo .NET at the time. No biggie. Was just kind of feeling this position out, as it's early in my career.
Then I talked to them both. The tech guy described their work, what they did and with what technologies, while the other grilled on personality and work style. This is the part that really rubbed me the wrong way. To be frank, the latter had a nasty personality, and confirmed all the horrible things I read here. Said they use Fizzbuzz because some people "can't code their way out of a paper bag", really badgered me for not giving satisfactory answers to how I would handle coding "Without requirements" (yes, they literally asked that) and similar questions trying to assess how much work they could squeeze out of you. This made them seem like a chopshop, and I'm not surprised they're reaching out to very green juniors when they really want mid to senior people; they probably can't keep good talent with a toxic environment like that.
In the end I got a call a day or too later saying they weren't moving forward. No biggie. Didn't expect to get it given my experience level. The technical guy was a quiet, nice, bearded nerd who I'd probably enjoy learning from, but the other guy was a window into a broken company culture and it's probably best I steer clear.
They said they use regexes heavily for some file format translation they're doing and that sounded interesting to me, but sadly their test didn't address regexes at all. A shame, because that's an area where I'm VERY strong, from my previous self-taught web development experience in Perl, PHP, JS, etc.
Otherwise, I was surprised how very sensible the technical portion of their interview process was. The broken web app thing seemed to apply directly to the kind of work done and give a good feel where a person stands. It's interesting that such a seemly broken company has such a sensible screening process (compared to the algorithmic questions, brain teasers, and whiteboard coding I've heard horror stories of other companies using)
(the reviews here also read as being largely phony and that was a HUGE red flag for me)
