Started fairly normal, but turned into the weirdest interview process that I've ever been part of.
There was a phone screen from the HR person, followed by a phone interview with the hiring manager. This was then followed by a coding test that was performed at home (unlike others who have posted reviews here, I didn't think this was a difficult test at all... probably took about an hour and a half, and then only because I was trying to be really careful). Once I submitted that, they told me I did great and flew me out for an onsite in San Francisco.
At the on-site, the interviews were a mix of technical (lots of coding on the whiteboard), as well as more general questions about my background. Most of the whiteboard coding exercises didn't seem particularly difficult or unusual, although one at the end gave me some trouble. After this, I flew home.
The hiring manger emailed me the next day saying that it sounded like the team was pretty happy, but there was one person who was absent that day and wanted to interview me over the phone. I had that phone interview the next day and things seemed to go pretty well. The day after that, they emailed me saying that "the team was very happy with the interview and wanted to move forward". They asked me to send them a list of references, so I did (2 previous mangers and 1 previous lead). A couple of days later, I got notification from my references that they had been contacted. At this point all I needed to do was wait to see what the offer was going to look like, right? Evidently not.
This is where started to really deviate from the norm. Four days later, they called me back and said "We're going to pass." I immediately feared that there must have been some issue with one of my references, so I contacted all of them to see if something had gone wrong. I didn't sleep very much that night. The hiring manager as well as the HR person both contacted me within the next couple of days and assured me that it had nothing to do with the references, but rather it had something to do with the "hiring process". I tend to believe them that my references all put in a good word, as I don't know why they would have gone out of their way to tell me otherwise that if it weren't true. Still, I have not idea what really happened... according to the hiring manager, the team's analysis of my interview had inexplicably gone from "very good" to "don't hire him" over the time period during which the references were being checked. It seems hard to believe that 6 or 7 really smart people could be _that_ indecisive. The hiring manger and HR person both apologized for the way things had gone and said that I was a "victim of the process". They really did seem sincere, and I appreciate their effort to follow up, but the sequence of events will never make very much sense to me.
