Comment by akadien

I had a first interview with a company where an engineer walked into the room with an eight page C++ exam. No interview. No meet-and-greet-tell-me-about-yourself. Just write, using pen and paper, several complete C++ programs for really hard academic-style problems (combinatorial optimization, dynamic programming, machine learning). Oh, and you had 1 hour. It wasn't an interview as much as a graduate level final exam.