I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Barclays
Interview
The hiring process included the typical online-assessment work (numerical/verbal reasoning) which as always seems somewhat straightforward. About a week after hearing I had passed this phase, I was invited to interview. The interview was split into two halves lasting about 45 minutes' each, the first was competency-focused and asked the usual "think of a time" style questions. The latter half of the interview lasted a further 45 minutes and involved reading through code and talking about what it did, what problems if any existed with it and how it could be proved. As the code chosen was from an older system, there were plenty of talking points.
The interviewers were personable and friendly, clearly comfortable discussing the job and the role and encouraged answering any questions about Barclays itself - they were very much open to questions about the future work available as far as was possible to discuss. Overall, a good experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There wasn't really a difficult or unexpected question during this interview - the most unexpected part of the intervieww was the unknown code, but you'd expect to be looking at new code when you start so this is not an unrealistic demand in interview.
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Barclays (Praga) in Jun 2012
Interview
Overall, I was quite happy with the process. It was detailed and thorough enough, so I felt confident that they are doing a good job at picking a good candidates only so I will not have to deal with ... suboptimal colleagues if I get hired and at the same time it was not tiring or boring. A written test about Perl and a couple of rounds of interviews with prospective colleagues and managers, with enough time for both sides to ask questions. All people involved were friendly and felt really interested in the process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing really "unexpected". The most difficult question was to write a short program in Perl on a piece of paper.