I've had my eye on SitePen for a while after they gave Dojo training at my company. I've wanted to move from desktop dev to web dev, and I use Dojo heavily in a personal project. I've also read several books on JavaScript and have a better than average mastery of it, though otherwise I'm a newb at web dev. I wanted an opportunity to learn web dev from the best while working from home, so I gave it a shot. I heard back the day after I sent in my application, and the first round was a timed, 3-hour coding project. The morning of the project, I received the instructions to write a bookmarklet to analyze a page and stuff (I won't give the whole thing away). I'd never heard of a bookmarklet before, nor had I used much raw DOM manipulation, so my 3 hours was filled with some intense Googling and Stack Overflowing. I was pretty proud of what I produced, hitting most of the requirements with well crafted, object-oriented code. Then the hour Skype interview. I thought that this interview would focus on the coding project and my past resume experience, so I spent some hours thinking about what I'd do differently in the project and how I'd improve on it as well as reviewing my past projects. I got the call from two developers who sounded like they'd taken a glance at my resume 1 minute previously, and we continued to have zero conversation about either the coding project or my resume experience. It didn't help that it was 90 degrees in the room I was calling in, or that I started off the interview by butchering one of their names. They asked general web development questions and also algorithm brain teasers. I did well (I think) on the slightly-harder-than-FuzzBizz questions, but anything requiring me to hold more than two variables in my head fell me over. I think I sounded like an idiot with the general web development questions, but probably anyone with professional background would handle these (e.g. how to design for performance, how to design for security). I was asked twice if I had consulting experience. Both times I answered "no", which sure sounded like the wrong answer. I think by the end of the interview they had stolen my lunch money too. Needless to say, a few days later I received the courtesy decline along the lines of "We're all rock stars. You're not. Goodbye"