Nerdery Front End Developer interview questions

I took an assessment test that was fairly telling and a bit challenging. To be honest, once you pass this test, they basically want to meet you to make sure you have good character and aren't a jerk. They learned through our interactions that I was passionate about my job and about the role that this discipline plays in my life. The Nerdery thrives, in my opinion, because if you're an employee, it means they can trust you, you're already self-driven, you care about your job, and to care about the the company and others.

Process took around 4+ weeks to complete and I went through a recruiter. I had one in-person interview where they ask a bunch of softball questions and generally tell you how awesome it is to work there. You get the tour and they talk about all the Red Bull you can drink, the free breakfast and beer on Fridays and how the office is open 24 hours a day. I thought to myself, "This is great, but free Red Bull won't pay my mortgage." During the tour, they were touting all the cool cubicles and the tables lined with developers with their huge DJ headphones on, heads down, cranking away on code. All I could think of was, "Man, this place looks like a sweatshop." There's a few cubes, but those are for the customer service people who need quiet to talk to customers. The majority of developers are elbow to elbow at long tables, working on stuff, and the noise was noticeable. Both guys were practically shouting at me during the tour as we walked. My first interview was with two guys in a small room with comic book covers all over the walls. One was a change-management manager, and the other a project manager. I thought it was odd considering neither really knew about development except to say they could see me writing .Net in three months of working there - which I thought was rather odd considering I was a front-ed developer. I chalked it up to the sales process and them just blowing smoke to get me interested. The second part is the code challenge. As a front-end guy, they give you a PSD and then you have to code it up best way you know how. There aren't a lot of rules, and it's pretty open to discussion. The PSD is pretty straight forward. Nothing incredibly challenging, they're just looking for your coding technique, how you handle layout issues and making sure stuff works in IE6. Yes, you read that right, your code needs to work in IE6 and with Javascript turned off (although they won't tell you about the JS part up front. I had a buddy let me know in advance, so I was prepared). This is the part where it gets weird. I crank out their site, put it up on my personal site, and send them back an email with the link and some general information about some of the things I did and why I did them. A week goes by, nothing. I figure, "Eh, whatever, they didn't like it, no biggie." then my phone rings the following Monday. It's the recruiter. She says they called and I passed the code challenge, and they would be calling me later in the afternoon to set up the final interview. She also tells me what they're going to offer me. It's a total low ball offer. I mean, it's close to 20K less than what I'm currently making. I pause for a while, then the recruiter asks, "Is it too low?" So I tell her to call the Nerdery recruiter back and let her know they need to come up and make an effort to close the gap. $5-10K less I can maybe do. More than $20K? No way I'm going that low. Sure thing, recruiter says she'll call them and then get back to me tomorrow. At this point, I'm already moving on. Thinking to myself, "Jesus, no way I can do that, better keep looking and keep my current gig a while longer." Then, at 6:30pm, I get an email from a senior developer telling me I flunked the code challenge. And no, it wasn't, "Sorry you didn't pass the challenge, better luck next time." the title of the email was, "Nerdery Code Challenge: FLUNKED" so now I'm a little pissed and open it up. The whole email was essentially nit picking my style. "You used ID's in these two places, we only use classes for everything here at the Nerdery." "Why did you use the hex value for this color? We use RGB values." Why did you use pixels for measurements? We use EM's for everything here." It was really weak if you ask me. It really felt like they gave me the passing grade, then my recruiter called and said their offer was too low and then they rejected my code challenge to save face. Of course the next morning the recruiter called and said they weren't going to go any higher with their offer and so the last interview was cancelled. The funny part is the Nerdery recruiter has called me several times since wondering if I was interested in going through the process again.