Contacted by an excellent contract recruiter retained in-house by the company. He spent nearly 3 hours talking with me to take the measure of my experience and personality as best he could, not being an engineer himself. Though a mercenary, he was a capable and intelligent headhunter, an asset to any client.
He arranged for one of the company's more senior engineers to call me for a technical screen. I spoke to the guy a few days later, for about two hours, and found him personable and intelligent. Based on our interaction, he recommended to his colleagues that I do an on-site group interview with a whiteboarding component.
I arrived in Berkeley and was made welcome by several staff members, and got down to business interviewing with the contract recruiter present in "fly on the wall" mode and two of the staff engineers, one the CTO-equivalent and one apparently junior engineer.
The most senior engineer, a sharp and intellectually astute guy who graduated Stanford about 4 years ago, drove the interview. We spent some "getting to know you time," then got down to business. I was given a challenge which exercised my reasoning skills (about 80%) with only a modicum of programming expertise (about 20%). A well-conducted "But is he a smart guy?" challenge, and I plan to add it to my own repertoire.
This was followed by a more experience-addressable question involving degradation of database performance over time, which I believe I knocked out of the park... mainly because the local crew seems to be inexperienced with data warehousing.
Two hours into the interview, one of the engineers signalled the other for a hallway conversation, which lasted about a minute. They returned to politely inform me that they were cutting the interview short, and thanked me for my time. The recruiter, still present, seemed a bit shocked, and I politely asked what motivated the decision; I was informed that they had no issues with my technical grounding, and that I seemed a very interesting person, but they were looking for a very good "personality fit." In my case, I ventured, it wasn't the case that I'm an unsociable troll - far from it, and I have validation outside my own head to confirm that - but that I simply was "not mellow enough" for their team.
Wow.
This determination was made, I was told, because "one of [those] present" was uncomfortable and called the quorum. Folks, they have a cultural rule which requires unanimity of opinion during interviews, and any one present can veto continuance of the interview process. It's a remarkably naive way of doing things, and I'll venture they generate lots of interviews but few hires. It must be enormously frustrating for their recruiter.
Of course, one can't fault them for exercising fine-grained control over their hiring process using any arbitrary metric of their choosing, but it is a rather unfortunate thing for them in the long run, especially given the special challenges they express they have at this stage in their development. But they're probably right about the personal fit thing: I was ready to leave much earlier when I found out they have an enormous code base, millions of users, but almost no software tests in place. I couldn't have made much of a difference in a situation that dire, I think.
