My process started in the mid of January and it took PayPal more than 3 months to complete my interview process, which did not include an onsite interview. To start with I must say, this was the worst interview process I have ever seen. All my interviews were rescheduled at least once. I feel the recruiters need to be given training and even college students would do a better job.
My first interview was a simple phone round. The interviewer was rude, went over my resume and tried to shame me on my face. I am not saying that my resume was a perfect one, but his idea of interview was to show me that whatever I have done so far previously has been a waste of time. After all the shaming process, he gets to technical questions. He asked me to code up HTML form verbally. Yes, you are reading it right, I had to verbally code up an HTML form with event handling and form submissions. He later asked me a couple of questions on JQuery. Finally he moved to Java. I am a .Net developer and am comfortable working in Java as well. He asked me all the syntactical and java specific language questions. I answered all of them but still he seemed to be unhappy. This guy was in a hurry, and finished the interview in 35 mins instead of 60 minutes.
After a week, I get to know that I will have another phone interview.
My second and third interviews were supposed to happen back to back on skype. One of the interviewers did not turn up. I kept waiting, mailed the recruiter multiple times, and finally after 45 minutes I get to know that the interviewer is busy on a phone call. So, instead of two interviews, I will have one round, and the other round will be rescheduled for some other time.
So, in this round, this guy again asked me Java specific questions. He seemed to be in a hurry and tried to finish as soon as possible. Again, the guy was in a hurry and finished the interview in 30 minutes this time.
The 3rd round, was rescheduled for a week later. The confirmation mail from HR had another candidate's information instead of mine. I contacted them and they said it was a typo. On the day of interview, I get a mail again that my interview will have to be rescheduled again. It was rescheduled for the next week. Again, on the day of interview, I get a mail that interview will happen a couple hours late, originally scheduled for 1 PM will now happen at 3 PM. This was followed by a couple other mails, stating that new time is 4 PM and then 5 PM. Finally, I had the interview at 5 PM.
The interviewer was a lady this time and it was a skype round. She went over my resume and seemed pretty impressed by it. She then realizes that she hasn't asked any technical questions. So she asked me to write Singleton Pattern. So, I write it on a piece of paper and then show it to her on the camera. She wasn't able to read it and I click a photo and send it her. Whatever be the case, she had a positive feedback.
Next, I get to hear from my recruiter after a week. She seemed confused in her mail. She says she wants to move forward and have a second phone interview. I tell her that I have already had three. She changes the interview now and schedules a one last interview with hiring manager.
My interview with the hiring manager was on skype again. Finally I have a true coding round. He asks me to write a string incrementor. Given a string, I need to find the string that would come next in the sequence. For example, abcd => abce or acz => ada.
The next question was Binary Search in a rotated array. The last one was to code up a Producer-Consumer problem. I was able to answer all three.
After the interviews, I wait again. For a week I do not hear from the recruiter. I send them a mail again that I have other deadlines coming up. This wakes them up. They say they will get back to me. After a week, I get to know they are offering me. The recruiter calls me up, and says Paypal compares well in Silicon Valley and pays something similar to Google, FB and Twitter. She then asks me if I have any offers, and I tell her the details. I had couple other offers, not from the companies mentioned, but were paying decently enough. She did not even try to match it up. She just gave me a couple weeks time to decide. They were not even close and I am sure Google, FB and Twitter pay much higher than what I currently have.
The next day I mail her that I do not find the offer competitive and requested her to review it again. I already have 2 offers which are 30% higher than what you are paying. I get a call from the recruiter. They were not ready to negotiate. She sounded rude and uninterested. Also, she reduced the deadline to accept the offer from 2 weeks to just 3 days. This was mean on her part. It was like take it or go, we do not care. We have other people who are ready to work for pennies that we are giving.
I rejected the offer. Of course, I have better offers. This was the most horrible interview experience I have ever had.
