I had the worst interview/recruitment experience of my career at Lixar IT in Ottawa. Applied online and got a call from HR in Nova Scotia not long after indicating that they wanted me to do an in-office interview. That process took several weeks, with me having to enquire with them again before they followed up with an interview date. My onsite interview was with 4 employees, 2 onsite and 2 via teleconference. The interview experience was very unusual, it started with 30-45 minutes of HR questions, some very standard but many that felt more like they were interviewing for a management position than a software developer. When they finally got around to technical questions, the nature of the questions didn't improve much. Mostly they asked a lot of "can you define X" type questions and got really hung up on details and minutiae vs. asking questions that would determine whether or not I actually understood concepts or attempting to understand the value of my past experience or skill set. It felt like they had a checklist of definitions and specific knowledge they needed to check off or else you didn't fit in the box they were looking to fill. In addition to the HR questions and technical trivia, they asked a number of questions that left me with a distinct impression of the job: that I would be a robot writing code, exactly as I was told to do it with little or no room for independent thought. And I would periodically be dealing one-on-one with the client and if the client were unhappy, I'd have to deal with the repercussions of that too. Finally, one of the interviewers in Ottawa was quite rude. He was a senior developer and/or team lead and seemed to take every opportunity to be as obnoxious as possible during the interview. At one point he lead me down a path of questioning, prompted me to explain my answers in detail and then proceeded to berate me in great detail how and why I was wrong - on a topic that was clearly a subjective matter of opinion (coding style). The other onsite interviewer (developer) barely spoke during the interview - he asked one question and otherwise just awkwardly stared at me. The interview took nearly 3 hours in total, during which I was never offered a glass of water, a bathroom break, etc. It felt more like a criminal interrogation than a job interview.

Smart team and interesting questions. Took about 3 weeks after submitting my resume to the hire. Met with HR, team leads and directors. 1 phone screen and then 2 in person interviews to follow. Teams are located in both Halifax and Ottawa so there was 1 or 2 people in the room with me and 1 on the phone.