A more helpful (accurate) description, for many startups, would probably go like this:<p><i>Interview process: one 4-hour take-home assignment (which may or may not be properly articulated, and which, in any case, there's a fairly good chance we may never respond to); 3 on-site whiteboarding sessions (the first conducted by someone whose first words to you are "man, I'm hungover!"; the second, by a pair of disinterested devs from another team, apparently shanghaied into covering for someone else, who take turns boredly rushing you through algorithm questions, while the other plays with his phone; and the third by the resident math genius who walks into the room well past the time they said you'd be done, says "Hey, got time for another?" and proceeds to grill you on a mis-stated graph search problem that ends up having a null solution class); and finally, a pair-programming session on some made up problem which you're required to use certain clearly unsuitable data structures to solve (resulting in clearly unusable performance in any real system) "because it's easier, and because I wanna see how you think. Look, just tell me what to type, OK?"</i><p>Only to be told 2 weeks later, when you timidly beg the HR contact for an "update", that you aren't a "culture fit."