Application was via an internal referral from a friend who used to work at a start-up I was at. He put me in their system and around 4 days later, a recruiter called for first contact.
The recruiter was quick to assess what I have done and decide to bring me straight in for a 1h30 min interview the next week. In this session I got a quick "hi" from the recruiter and then two 30 min slots, one on architecture and design (so called pirate interview) and the other on coding (ninja). Of the 2, I stormed the coding question but met with an interviewer in the pirate side that had tailored a question from his previous experience in the area I had recently worked in and it didn't work out (mostly as I knew more about the topic and the interviewer wanted to talk about a specific trick he knew). Still, I got called back the next week for a full day.
Lunch, more coding, culture interviews etc... Coding and design were knockouts again, the softer skills were less successful. I think the key here is that you need to present a confident, well rehearsed personality with answers for the usual questions (biggest mistake etc...). DO NOT talk about mistakes and then admit you don't know the root cause for them, even if they were true mysteries. Pick another example!!!
The process took ~4 weeks, the end dragging out by 2 weeks as it seems they could not decide if it was a hire or not. I had multiple offers by this time and had to take one that was expiring and too good to miss. Later I found that there was no hire decision and felt ok about it - I would probably think about going back at some point, but with a stronger prep in the softer skill Q+A side.
