What's the longest technical interview you've ever had?

[NorthWestPerm2Contr]

My last one. Went on for 2.5 hours without a break.

I think they had planned 30 minutes, but they made the unfortunate mistake of asking me "Using the whiteboard and the various coloured pens behind you, please detail the last system you worked on."

I'd been at the previous gig. over two years, and had worked on the system from inception through to production. Once I got talking, I just couldn't find it within myself to stop - at least whilst they remained awake.

Did the trick though. They'd offered me a role before I'd even left the building (in retrospect, they probably just offered the role in order to see the back of me that day. )

I must try that one next time I want a gig really badly!

[lukemg]

Same as DP, at a lowpoint career wise, did an 8 hour interview from hell for a tulipe permie job on half previous contract rate.
Got it and had to take it due to lack of other options.....

[fullyautomatix]

About 2 hours.

One hour was PM and lead techie asking me all sorts of nonsensical technical questions. I should have been alerted by then that they were total aholes, but something made me stay just to prove myself to the idiots.

Anyway, after the interview I thought it was done and dusted when they shove me into room, sat me in front of a laptop with no internet connection and handed me a printout which basically said I should build a shopping cart from scratch. This means, set up a DB, write the business layer, write the data access layer and then the UI in aspx.

I felt it was a joke. Anyway, rolled up my sleeves and started to write some classes and interfaces when I find that the tech lead is actually perched almost on top of me glaring at what I am typing. He would not budge, he wanted to know why I was writing an interface and why I am declaring properties that way etc etc.

I thought I would speed up coding by downloading a data access class from somewhere, no internet. Tech lead says he wants me to code without any help.

I left after 5 minutes pretending I was going to the loo

[Bunk]

About 2 hours.

One hour was PM and lead techie asking me all sorts of nonsensical technical questions. I should have been alerted by then that they were total aholes, but something made me stay just to prove myself to the idiots.

Anyway, after the interview I thought it was done and dusted when they shove me into room, sat me in front of a laptop with no internet connection and handed me a printout which basically said I should build a shopping cart from scratch. This means, set up a DB, write the business layer, write the data access layer and then the UI in aspx.

I felt it was a joke. Anyway, rolled up my sleeves and started to write some classes and interfaces when I find that the tech lead is actually perched almost on top of me glaring at what I am typing. He would not budge, he wanted to know why I was writing an interface and why I am declaring properties that way etc etc.

I thought I would speed up coding by downloading a data access class from somewhere, no internet. Tech lead says he wants me to code without any help.

I left after 5 minutes pretending I was going to the loo

Someone did that at one client I worked at. We were getting worried so someone went off to see if he was ok, nobody in the toilets, so we asked at reception and they said he'd left and handed his visitor's pass in. Ooops