I was first contacted by a recruiter through Linkedin for an initial phone screen, and then asked to complete a rather difficult technical project. This took a considerable amount of time and effort to complete, consuming the better part of a weekend. This was then followed by another phone screen with the Hiring manager and another member of Support, which lasted slightly more than an hour, and I would rate as difficult. This was then followed by yet another "non-technical" interview with 2 members of Support team (most of the discussion ended up being technical, where I was also told that they were impressed with the results of the technical project I had submitted.), followed by another discussion with the recruiter. I then flew from Portland to San Francisco, arriving at my hotel at midnight due to a flight delay, for a full-day, intensive technical on-site interview with 8 different people, each of which rigorously interviewed me for a full hour, including/over the course of lunch (I didn't really even get a chance to eat my lunch).
Interviews ran the gamut between behavioral, to very technical troubleshooting deep dives involving kernel/memory/stack-trace/system call - level debugging, writing scripts in an unfamiliar language, and even a strange walk around the block where the hiring manager told me that he had been sued for bringing too many people on board from another company (not sure what I was supposed to say to this..).
I was pretty exhausted by the end of it, and frankly didn't exactly handle the news that I didn't get the job very maturely, which might even be understandable given what I endured. I've never, ever had to work so hard for for so little in my entire life. I was also out of pocket for nearly $300 in expenses, which I'm still waiting to be reimbursed for - in the form of a check - that I expect will take weeks to receive.
