All day interview. Met with at least eight separate groups in sequence, passed off each time by HR person. Asked largely the same questions each time. Earlier, "asked" to attend an impromptu dinner following eight or so hours of being on point. During the day, staff generally cool in approach and questions. I liked most everyone, but many alluded to schism between scientist and developers, leadership-staff. Second group, I had to debug and hand code some relatively simple Java and without an IDE (I got it right), then, explain what was going on (this wasn't as easy to do so quickly without a few minutes to look it over). To the same group, had to defend code sample that, while not super clean, works and was OK given the circumstances under which it had been written. They were a bit snotty about my work. Upper management pretty self-absorbed and like to lecture you on their achievements in the same way professors do to their grad students. Senior admin staff (HR, operations) also pretty condescending. If you go, check out UK Queen theme in one office, it's pretty incongruous and makes the experience somewhat surreal...Dinner a waste, too personal at that point and not really fair, as in "what's this guy like after hours". I had hoped to be taken seriously by these people - I'm not a fabulous developer but have solid experience, science background and work hard - but I think they passed me over because of my general up-front, no-bs approach, my age, and family situation. Read: Don't be too forthcoming, do your best to be a door mat and you'll be fine.
