I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Canopy Financial (Chicago, IL) in Jun 2009
Interview
Got the interview through Human Capital Management. I was told my application was going to be presented to their Application Support and Product Development teams. The recruiter gave me a brief skills test on .NET terms, mostly definitions not coding.
Canopy wanted to schedule an on site interview with me the same day my application was presented to them by an external recruiter. The on site interview was scheduled for a week later. As the date approached I was contacted by the recruiter and told that I would need to do a presentation for the interview. I was given a database archiving problem about 3 days before the interview.
I did a full blown power point presentation and working code implementation for the problem with two different solutions and presented it to the interviewer who was the head of Canopy's Product Support group. Then I was asked a number of questions aimed at assessing my fitness in regard to culture. The interviewer stopped asking culture fit questions and had me ask him a number of questions. Finally I was asked to debug the broken code samples. I struggled with one, but eventually got it correct. The interviewer got up and told me that's all that was necessary for today and showed me the way to the elevators through a back exit.
After a week elapsed I got a call from the recruiter saying Canopy was looking for someone with more experience. I had roughly 2.5 years of .NET experience at the time.
I got the impression there were going to be a lot of hours worked in the Product Support group. 60 hours during crunch time and weekend availability as well. Average time was stated to be around 50 hours a week. The development department worked on an open floor, no cubes, but desks side by side. Many of the developers had at least 4 lcd monitors. The interviewer told me they pride themselves on using the newest .NET tech: visual studio 2008, SQL server 2008, Visual Studio Team Foundation and all.
The atmosphere was a mixture of business casual, polos with khakis, and gamer dork, E3 t shirt and bed head, but I got the feeling it was cliquey there.