to be frank, I interviewed at Pure primarily as an escape route from my prior job, where I'd thoroughly burnt out after nearly 7.5 years. I wasn't particularly excited about working at another storage company down the peninsula (and commuting from SF like I'd done prior to my last job), but a couple of my former colleagues were there and their reference got me straight to an on-site interview. but this on-site interview actually convinced me that this was exactly the kind of place I wanted and needed to be. the questions were very challenging -- I talked to four people and they each gave me one hard but doable problem. only for the last was I able to leverage any domain-specific knowledge (e.g. my 10+ years in SAN/NAS); the rest of the problems were really excellent questions getting at fundamental problems of optimization, concurrent programming, data structures/algorithms, and troubleshooting. I did well (they hired me, and I was told afterwards that no one had ever done as well on the domain-specific problem), but I had to work for it (I didn't already "know" the answers), and it felt great doing so -- I had the kind of back-and-forth dialog that you really want to see in an interview, b/c it gets to the heart of how you would interact with folks as colleagues. knowing the bar is set so high -- and knowing I'd cleared it -- reassures me that I'm in the right place, and will be in the right place for the foreseeable future. I left my last job because I'd become "the smartest guy in the room," when I'd joined that organization specifically because I was so happy to work with so many people that were smarter than me.