very hands on. ie the interviewer asked me to build a hands-on application but allowed me to suggest a few simple use cases. He was interested in seeing how i write ruby/rails code. No questions on rails internals or anything of that sort. It started with a phone screen, where i had a chance to describe my previous projects at very high level. Then i was invited to interview. Interviewer made me feel comfortable. Then we had a discussion. I suggested a simple use case involving a few simple entities with some possible related entities in a one-to-many scenario. He then provided a machine with Ruby on Rails 3.x installed and asked me to build something around the scenario discussed. I was told that it's ok to use scaffolding so that i did not have to build the view layer by hand. I could use any gem i wanted to. I could also use the internet to search for any information i needed. But i had to show him my code at the end of the process and discuss the design choices that i had made along the way. The interviewer did not seem too interested in specific coding errors, but was helpful in setting up things, and i could ask him for help if i got struck along the way.