Washington University Software Architect Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Sep 2010 in Saint Louis, MO (took 3 weeks)

A friend posted the job on a developer group message board. I fit the skills, so I applied. Within 12 hours, the scientist who ran the lab contacted me to schedule an interview. Within 1 week, I interviewed on site. The scientist asked about my experience, but didn't have many technical questions. The lab was just a cubical farm in a medical office building. It didn't seem like a fun place to work. Within 1 week, he contacted me with an offer, which was 25% too low. He was limited by what the university would pay, but offered to create a special position with his startup to meet my salary requirements. I was still interested and went to meet the team. The team I would be guiding was collectively very intelligent and educated, but lacked engineering discipline. They claimed to have newly adopted agile methodologies and were very accepting of new technologies (clojure, scala, python). I scheduled a team pairing session for 1 week later. When pairing, I discovered they had not implemented any agile practices as they initially claimed. The team wrote no tests and had little communication.