Phone interview with recruiter. Ask some basic questions, non technical. Asked if I would take an online programming test (HackerRank). I agreed and spent some time boning up on Java since I had not used that language for a while. I spent a lot of time getting familiar again with the advanced object oriented capabilities of Java. When I took the test it was some simple array manipulation which confused me a bit. I did not do well on the test and later I realized that the test was not a programming test of array manipulation but a test of algorithmic complexity. Since I didn't recognize this (because I was expecting higher level object oriented types of problems) I didn't take the time to really look at the problem statement and find the most efficient solution. The next day I'm driving on the freeway and I think, oh crap, that was an O(N) problem. Oh well. I fail.

I was really looking forward to my interview at HealthFusion. They started by giving me an at-home online Java coding test to complete. Requiring candidates to actually write code for their interviews? Great! +1! I did well on the test and was scheduled for an in-person interview. The HR representative sent me a list of my would-be interviewers. Judging from the list, it seemed like they had a very diverse group of engineers. Right on! +1! I was told over the phone that HealthFusion had a flat structure, was profitable, and had engineers who've been there for 8+ years. Sounds awesome! +1! Things took a turn for the worse when I got to the actual interview though. I was led to a conference room where four copies of my resume were distributed around the table. Wait a minute, was this going to be a 4-on-1 interview? Yes, yes it was. Four members of the engineering department entered the room and started the interview. There were many times during the interview when the five of us awkwardly looked around the room wondering where the next question would come from. There was one interviewer in particular who had a hostile attitude throughout the interview. At one point this interviewer shoved a sheet of paper at me with a SQL design problem and curtly said "you have 15 minutes." Towards the end of the interview, I asked this interviewer to describe the architecture of HealthFusion's product. She told me that they had a single web app. I asked her if they employed a service oriented architecture (which is the generally accepted sane modern way to structure a web app). She didn't seem to understand my question and kept reiterating that they had a single web app with multiple servlets. She then accused me of not knowing what a web app was. Nice. In another instance, that same interviewer mentioned that the developers all checked their code into "trunk." This prompted me to ask if they used Subversion or Git for their version control. She said that they had plans to migrate off of their current version control system, Microsoft Visual Source Safe, to a newer system. They were definitely not going to use Git, she said, but they were going to use Stash because of its integration with Jira. I looked up what Atlassian Stash was when I got home and found that it's an alternative to GitHub. Which means it's actually Git-based. Good.