I didn't see the role advertised - a recruitment agency called me and said it's a very niche specific computer programming role; they were struggling to find someone. I have roughly 15 years experience doing what they wanted for a lot of PIMCO's competitors so things looked positive. I chased the agency after a couple of days to ask them if they heard back from Pimco; the agencies response was "are you absolutely 100% sure you can do this? A few we previously sent through were not at the level expected after the phone interview" - this kind of puts you on edge straight away but I insisted they send my CV to them (bizarre behaviour considering they found me). My CV was forwarded and an initial phone interview was arranged a couple of days later. The phone interview involved being grilled about very specific technical things in a certain language and toolset - thankfully I knew a lot of the answers due to my experience. I have to be honest and say this type of interview can be unfair to someone with less experience - they're likely still capable of doing what they wanted but the questions were so specific it removed them from the race. The next day I was told by the agency that I was the first out of roughly 10 others to pass. A face to face interview at their office was arranged for the following week. I was told it would be 3 hours long and with different people. 3 HOURS! Still...I wanted the job and passed the apparently impassable phone interview so I went. I met with the person I could have ended up working with. He seemed nice enough but was much older than me by about 15 years; on our way to the meeting room I got the feeling of "I don't care about making small talk I just want to find the room and ask these questions". I was handed a piece of paper and asked to answer questions as best as I could; just like the phone interview stage I noticed the questions were very specific; essentially what was the result of bizarre formula combinations. I got most wrong and I was disappointed with myself (I am apparently an ‘expert’ in this); I remembered a couple of formulas to check when I got home afterwards - pretty much all of them were trick questions either producing errors or there were simpler ways of getting to the same answers (you'd never use the ones in the interview). This annoyed me afterwards because I felt the purpose of the first guy was to just outwit someone rather than learn someone’s abilities and what they could offer to Pimco. Still with the first person, the second set of questions asked me to write code; basically show how you thought through a problem and show logical techniques to do something efficiently; a fairly standard thing to do for this type of role. I managed to get the answers they wanted but the guy interviewing me suddenly started being pedantic by changing the questions after to show he could break the logic. In short; he just wanted to prove a point about how much smarter he apparently was; I couldn’t ever work with this type of person as he always had to “be the best” attitude. This first guy now left the room after 30-40 minutes after eagerly showing me how he would answer them. The second person asked me more about my background, what I currently do so nothing too challenging - basically reviewing my CV and from the top of his head asked random coding questions. The third person was a manager type asking more extremely specific things such as “how much computer memory should such and such take” – there isn’t really an answer to it because it depended on what you were doing. Towards the end this senior person asked me to talk about something I had programmed, however it ended up with him lecturing me how it should be done (despite not knowing all the details). By this stage I didn’t want to work for them – they just looked unprofessional and argumentative with ego problems. 2.5 hours in the fourth person (another developer) arrived and was the nicest of out of all of them. He pretty much repeated and asked what the second person did (CV questions) and then asked me yet more coding questions – thankfully I answered them correctly. I got on well with the final developer guy; we ended up laughing together because I wrote some code for him that did what he wanted but he initially said it was wrong. After reviewing it together, it turned out I was correct. It was nice to talk to someone on a personal level. I had 5 minutes at the end to ask questions. The interview was very one-sided; I didn’t want to work for them regardless. They didn't want to hear about me and what I can offer them; they were only interested if I could answer very random complex coding questions. I never heard back – no feedback or anything. It pretty much says it all, so I have literally no idea who it was they wanted or if they ended up employing anyone. All I can say is good luck to the poor person who did get it because working with the first guy would be a nightmare.