I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Glitch
No offer
Positive experience
Average interview
Application
I applied through university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Glitch (New York, NY) in Jan 2011
Interview
Fog Creek is a take no prisoners kind of firm with questions that will draw primarily from the data structures and algorithms. Be familiar with C as well as with a mainstream OOP language such as Java/C++. Other than that, the interview questions are fairly standard and of the same variety you can expect from Google or Amazon. Be prepared! My mistake was not reviewing enough of the relevant material. Seems like a great company to work for though with a solid grasp on the concept of best practices (thanks, I'm sure, in large part to the prominence of Joel Spolsky).
Fog Creek is has the most organized of screening process I could imagine. Really shows that their core competency is project management software.
The interview process was described as five 1-on-1 technical interviews. The interviews are strictly technical, and result in a hire/no-hire vote within hours. As long as I make it through the 5 without getting two no-hires, then the next step is a job offer.
I participated in one technical interview, writing javascript code on a shared whiteboard. I answered all questions and solved the problem to every level of complexity asked. The hour went fast, and at the end I asked if there was any other problems or details he would have asked if we had more time, and he said no, I had answered everything he had. Then I got the goodbye form letter. Apparently that guy's vote counted twice because I was out.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Whatever you do, don't say the word "array" unless you're making fun of it. These guys love stacks and pointers. It probably also hurt me that I chose Javascript as the language. You can't be a programmer unless you're a Java programmer.
I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Glitch in Jun 2014
Interview
Emailed in my resume, heard back maybe 2 weeks later from someone in HR. Spoke with her, had a brief phone call with someone else, mainly just giving me info and making sure I was worth the time for an engineer to interview. This was followed up with a technical phone interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard question. Interview definitely played to my strengths and tried to help where needbe.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Glitch (New York, NY) in Jun 2014
Interview
Application was very easy. You e-mail your resume. A follow-up bot responds and asks for any additional information that you might have left out.
Some time later, a human schedules a 15-minute phone screen as a quick bozo filter. This is to determine if you are worth spending interview time with a more technical and expensive employee.
The next interview was over the phone, and was overwhelmingly a technical demonstration to prove that you do, in fact, know how to write software. I was dropped after this point, given the explanation that it was a "painful choice" to pass over "extraordinarily promising" candidates.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a stack-based calculator that uses reverse Polish notation as I watch you do it on a shared text area.