It was interesting and different from any other place I interviewed with.

It started about a year ago. I was looking for my first job out of bootcamp, and a friend I made at RubyConf encouraged me to try Pivotal.

My friend referred me and within a week or so I was invited to have a technical screen over a video call.

Engineers at Pivotal practice pair programming most of the time, and the technical screen was also a pairing session.

We paired for about an hour using TDD to implement a set in Java, a language I never used previously, but the interviewer spent most of the pairing session in the “driver” position while I talked in pseudo-code, so everything worked out.

Unfortunately, before I got a chance to hear any feedback on the interview I got a job offer elsewhere. The place I got the offer at wasn't nearly as good as Pivotal, but at that stage in my career I wasn't in a position to turn down any offer just because I was hoping to get something better, so I dropped out of the Pivotal process and took the position with the other company.

Fast-forward a half a year, the job I took ended up being as bad as I expected and worse, and I seriously started looking elsewhere.

After a number of interviews that didn't make it to an offer I remembered the positive experience I had at Pivotal. I reached out to my friend who was more than happy to refer me again.

A week later the hiring manager reached out to me and scheduled a phone screen.

Looking at Glassdoor, I saw that apparently they didn't change their process since I last interviewed there, in fact, they were still implementing the same set in Java for the technical screen.

I found that interesting, and was looking forward to doing really well in my video interview, but that was not to be. During the phone screen the hiring manager told me that being that I already went through the technical screen a few months ago and got really good reviews that time they would skip that step and just jump straight to the on-site interview.

That was exciting news to hear. The on-site would be similar to the technical screen. There would be no “traditional” interview, just pairing with different teams for the whole day.

Interview day came. I arrived early. Pivotal provides breakfast every morning and I was invited to join. At standup I was introduced to the entire office and then went to my first pair of the day. We worked together all morning. My pair chose a very well-defined and well-contained story from their actual workflow and we were able to finish it by lunch time and submit a Pull Request.

For lunch two Pivots took me out to a nearby Kosher restaurant, that was a chance for me to hear what working at Pivotal was like and ask any questions I had.

After lunch I was introduced to my second pair for the day and we worked together for the rest of the day.

Just like the technical screen, both pairing sessions were in a language I had not used before (this time it was Go), but the interviewers made it very clear that they weren't screening for what I know, rather for how it was to work with me and how I learned and handled new things. Sure enough, I made sure to ask tons of questions, did my best, and was even able to take the “driver” posting by the end of the day in a completely new language and codebase.

A few days later the hiring manager reached out to me to schedule a phone call. He made it clear to me that they didn't finish getting feedback from everyone involved, but this phone call was for them to get feedback from me about the interview so that they could keep improving it for future candidates.

I found that interesting, and we scheduled a phone call for the next day.

During the phone call he told me he'd probably finish getting everyone's feedback and have a final answer by tomorrow morning, so to play it safe we scheduled another phone call for tomorrow evening.

You can imagine my productivity for the rest of the day at work was completely gone. The next morning the hiring manager emailed me that he had an answer for me, and if I was available we could reschedule the phone call for lunch time. I took that as a good sign, but didn't want to get my hopes too high.

During my lunch break he called me and made a very generous offer (like 25% more than what I was expecting under my best-case scenario). After hammering out a few details I accepted the offer a few days later, and two weeks after that I was back in the office for my first day of work.

PS: Yes, they're hiring: Software Engineer - Pivotal Container Service (PKS)