Contacted by recruiter, had a regular phone call and onsite interview (San Francisco, CA) Interview itself was good, pretty regular type by SF standards. But! After that recruiter came back to me and said something like "Interview went well, Sony guys want to give you an offer, but they decided they want to offer you a lower position (Staff Engineer) than you were interviewing for. But don't worry, it's the same money. Do you want to see the offer?". I answered "Uhm, well, I did not expect that, but let's see what they offer, I will think about it". Then recruiter responded "Actually, it's one more position lower (Senior Engineer). But don't worry, it's the same money". At that time I was wondering that if I say "yes", they would probably try to lowball me even further. Also I'm not sure "the same money" means what they think it means. Only later, after more talks, I realized that there were no "Sony guys that got back" to the recruiter. It seems that Sony completely offloaded hiring + salary negotiations to another company, so it's actually recruiter who does all the negotiations, and he's not in touch with any "Sony guys" during the process. Also, recruiter got really pissed off at me not replying to him for two business days (my fault), and he tried to put me into blame for receiving a lower offer because that. I've never seen such a bad recruiting process in my years. Hint: When recruiter tells you: "Sony guys got back to me and said XXX" that's a lie. Recruiter is the only person that does negotiation. And probably gets a bonus for lowballing you. As for the technical team, they seem to do a really great job for their diverse set of projects and technologies with no hype about it, I liked them. I think I'd learn a lot from them professionally.