Some background: I have had 3 jobs (not including assistantships) till now - two were at the big companies mentioned below (MS/Amzn) and currently am at Snap fo

Some background: I have had 3 jobs (not including assistantships) till now - two were at the big companies mentioned below (MS/Amzn) and currently am at Snap for the past year or so. Before joining Snap I did interview around and had offers from the likes of FB/Twitter/Oracle as well - So I guess I have relevant and recent points here. - Almost all the interviews followed the same pattern maligned a lot in HN. - Almost in every one of those loops, I felt like my current experience building storage systems and replication wasn't examined very well. - I had many other informationals where the company felt completely borgish (no one knew what the other parts were doing), where the recruiters were clueless, where they were trying to undercut me by 50% or so(We have the smartest!), under level me (We always under level outside hires!), where they had no real reason to hire me (We are always looking for smart people!), where they were just trying to prove that they are smarter and so on. All this when I had 5 odd offers in hand and actually told them that to see if they would have a productive conversation rather than wasting everyone's time. But I do have different takeaways from these though: - For every guy like me, there are a lot of other folk who can probably spend the whole hour with you and make you leave ambivalent. You will never know whether you hired him because you liked him or because of his skills. - An actual (even a flawed one) datapoint is better than nothing. - If the guys interviewing me are anything like me, They probably spend 5-10 hours a week on interviews already. This means custom tuning a process for each candidate is exorbitantly hard. I mean we do look at resumes and try to calibrate what we expect from a given candidate and we do assign certain folk to get information about their current positions - but a completely personalized loop is still in the zone of people who have been the top 1% of any company. If you aren't there, you gotta expect the rote process. - I don't have a week to fully dedicate to each company. I currently have a hard job - and I prefer to prepare for a generic process rather than custom one. - It isn't really hard to prepare for this anyway: In fact the rote process makes it so much easier. There are set concepts and websites. I built my own list, filled them in with actual notes, practiced a 100 problems to get into the mode and was in. - At the end of the day, all these companies have great people in great teams solving great problems. It is very very hard to distinguish one from the other, There is a very high chance you will end up doing very similar work for one or other. So now the distinguishing factors become something else. - The recruiters in general are just trying to meet a quota.