Before being allowed to interview you have to submit a written test that consisted of writing a small program to solve a particular problem. Techniques and methods I demonstrated included Dependency Inversion, Separation of Responsibilities, Unit Testing and Mocking, Interface Segregation Principles and general awareness of programming design patterns. The standard for acceptance for interviews was high and out of 8 candidates I was the only one that made it through the first round. The actual interview included discussions around Agile practices as well as demonstrating in depth knowledge of SOLID programming principles. The second part of the interview consisted of extending and modifying the original program that was sent in. The idea was to demonstrate how you approach a problem and see whether your original program design could be easily changed and extended. Further in-depth technical questions were then asked to elicit opinions of ORM's vs Stored Procedures as well as determine my understanding of how mocking tools (in this case Moq) work (hint: they use a dynamic proxy). Although I didn't get the job, this was without doubt, one of the best and most thorough interview processes I've been through.

I love interview processes where people assess the way you think about dealing with problems and not just the technologies you know. I love interview processes where you meet a team of blatantly-passionate developers. At Top Table I was treated to exactly this. It involved a coding challenge, a pair programming session then a few discussion - firstly technical and secondly cultural. From a developer point of view, I got a lot of confidence that I would be working for a company that has top-level developers and values them greatly. The reasons for my rejection were perfectly adequate and I'm grateful the team at Top Table were so open with their decision. Some of those reasons were clear from my C.V before I applied, but I really enjoyed the interview process and meeting the team - I would have done it for fun anyway.