I applied for a JavaScript Engineer position via a generic eBay "we're hiring!" ad on Monster.com. I got an e-mail and a call quickly from an "outside recruiter" who bubbled about how eBay would do anything to recruit me. But, I've been around so I knew that this was just her job and a sales pitch. eBay hiring is an assembly line: an "outside recruiter" fills the interview funnel by convincing as many people to apply, "internal recruiters" get the resumes from the funnel and decide who to submit to their managers, "phone coordinators" spend all day arranging phone interviews between interviewers and candidates and "in person coordinators" spend all day arranging in-person interviews. So, you have 4 people whose sole job is to organize one portion of the interview. (At least, for the group that I ended up interviewing with.) I had a 45-minute phone interview with a guy who asked technical questions but didn't make me write code. 20 minutes later, I had another 45-minute phone interview with a girl who asked me technical questions and had me write snippets of code in Google Docs. I did OK (not great) on the first and seemed to say "I don't know" a bunch of times on the second. I figured that I'd blown it and wouldn't hear back and moved on. A few days later, I got a weird call from the (internal) recruiter. They were eager to do an in-person interview but wanted to confirm that I'm interested in the position and that it wasn't too easy. At the in-person interview, I walked past a big room. It had long desks with keyboards and LCD screens every 4 feet. Each "station" was separated by a separator mounted on the top of the desk. They explained that they are moving away from cubicles to this style which makes it look like a call center or like a study desk at a library with less privacy. But, no, it's not a call center; software developers work here. Since the engineers have no privacy, I could look across the entire room and see something like 90% of the people were Indian or Pakastani or similar. Here and there, I saw a white or an Asian face but the vast majority were Indian and, during lunch, I saw a big group eating around the large break room table and every single one was Indian. I had 6 interviews over 5 hours, 45-minutes each. The first guy was likeable; we discussed XSL (from my resume) and he asked me to write reverse a linked list. The second guy was odd, had a thick accent, and would pause for long periods, even though he hadn't finished the question; he asked me to describe (but not code) the maximum sum subsequence algorithm, how I could do the categories tab for eBay and how I would design a stock ticker. The third guy had me describe an algorithm to find the total number of matching pairs in an array. The fourth guy had a thick accent and asked me to write code to implement a queue. The fifth guy was the manager: we got lunch at the eBay cafeteria, came back to the room, talked about my background, then he asked me to work through the ABCDE x 4 = EDCBA. The sixth guy asked me about closure. When the last guy walked me out, I asked how many interview he does. He says that he does about 3 interviews a week and, if I understood correctly, pretty much every week of his entire career at eBay. He's just a regular software developer so hiring isn't his main job. It shows that they do tons of interviews and it's pretty much an assembly line. I felt that I did OK (but not great) at the interview but I strongly felt that I stuck out because I wasn't Indian. Everything about my interview felt like I was in India, not only the people but the culture, the way of doing business, the preferences, the interests, everything. Don't they realize that the perfect candidate would be Indian? Why not yield to the obvious and just focus on Indian candidates exclusively? It seemed like a bad fit so I moved on. A few days later, I got a message on my voicemail and, when I called, they said that they wanted to make an offer. Uh, ok. They said that my relevant experience was not long enough so they'd like to bring me in at lower grade but, as the recruiter said, who cares as long as they can meet my salary demands, right? Uh, I suppose. We discussed my current salary and my salary goals then the recruiter said that she'd get me my offer by the end of the day or by the next morning. No offer came and I moved on. A few weeks later (after the holidays), a different eBay recruiter called me out of the blue and said that the same group wanted to offer me the job. He gave a pretty hard sell about all the intangible benefits of the job, like the cafeteria and job security and the eBay brand, so I figured that they were setting me up for a lowball offer. And I was right. They made me an offer and I told them the next morning, "Thank you for your offer but I've decided to decline." I did discuss the offer with my family but they were like, no way, no how.