I would like to share how inhuman a lot of the interview processes are. Some examples:
* recruiter says a startup is interested, introduces me to the HR person via email. I get a 2 sentence email from HR, telling me that I have to schedule a phone technical interview in the next day or two, they need to onboard FAST.<p>Okay, I don't know what the job is, who the client is, and the last thing I want to do is be grilled over the phone. I'm certainly uninterested in your time crunch and am not going to rearrange my life to meet your schedule requirements (there were narrow stipulations on acceptable times).<p>* Talk with a company, and explain that I don't do whiteboard interviewing. Oh, a session is no problem, but the interview has to be as much letting me interview and question you. 'No problem, we just want to talk and see where you'll fit in'.<p>Come the day, and I barely get a 'hi', just nonstop whiteboard coding in an intense environment. Took the whole day off for that time waste. Two of the sessions had me solve essentially the identical problem - I waste my day, they don't take 5 minutes to plan out what I'll be asked. Then they call me back, and tell me I have to come in for another series a day later, which was entirely unexpected, and not communicated to me prior to agreeing to interview. And if my requests for how the interview is conducted can't be honored, fine, tell me, and either I'll change my mind or decide not to waste a day taken from work. The cap to all of that was the 'shoot the messenger' emails when I said I was not accepting due to how this all went down (and oh, I didn't respond quickly enough to that email, meaning it took me a few hours, so more grief for that).<p>* Just general, insistent demands as if I have nothing to do but interview with your company. If you have your resume out there, all you do is field phone calls and emails. I'm not going to pursue anything without knowing quite a bit about the job because I don't have to. There is always going to be better, low hanging fruit - cold emails with very accurate, detailed descriptions of a wickedly cool start up, recruiters that actually get to know your skill sets and desires, and so on.<p>* No exposure to what the work will be like. It's so secret they can't tell you, or there is a 'variety of work', or whatever. No work environment tour. No discussion of compensation, work hours, and so on until you've wasted a day or more in interviews.<p>* 'Go and study this book for a month, and then apply'. Um, I'm 47 and have a very successful career of inventions and products. Surely you don't have to quiz me on red-black tree implementation to access my abilities. If I need to know that, I'll open the book and learn it.<p>It was, by and large, very unpleasant. Perhaps it is not the best proxy, but I go in assuming the interview process is the time you are trying to impress and woo me the most, and judge you on that.