The other problem that I found annoying when interviewing (even with Startups) is the way the whole system is organized.
1. Talk to recruiter who is a non-tech person who doesn't really know what they are talking about and to whom you cannot really go in deep. This is the only casual conversation that you get to have about the company. (Assuming you don't know anyone there..)
2. Have phone screens which are that exactly: Ways for the company to give you a few puzzles and determine whether you based on whether you follow a certain process of solving them are actually good enough to join them. At the end of this, you are asked if you have any questions for them. In a big company, this person might not even ever work with the team that you are interviewing for. There is a good chance that after a grilling interview, you are tired and can't really have an actual conversation.
3. You have interviews at their office which again are designed to grill the candidate and don't offer any time for the candidate to get to know the people on a personal level.
I used to wish there was a way I could talk to an engineer in a company over coffee (and I am not talking about the whole lunch interview thing that a lot of companies do) and figure out what they actually do, what they want in a candidate and what sort of skill sets that they are looking for. Over the past few months, I have come to the realization that I am not sure many companies actually know the answer to that and all they are trying to do is to get the "best" without actually properly defining what that even means.
It's kind of hard to be a struggling grad student in Austin and offer to buy engineers in San Francisco coffee. :-) However, having said that, what you say does make a lot of sense.
My school was filled with either folks who went and worked for Google/FB or disappeared to work for large embedded systems firms. I wanted to work for a start up doing machine learning.
1. Talk to recruiter who is a non-tech person who doesn't really know what they are talking about and to whom you cannot really go in deep. This is the only casual conversation that you get to have about the company. (Assuming you don't know anyone there..)
2. Have phone screens which are that exactly: Ways for the company to give you a few puzzles and determine whether you based on whether you follow a certain process of solving them are actually good enough to join them. At the end of this, you are asked if you have any questions for them. In a big company, this person might not even ever work with the team that you are interviewing for. There is a good chance that after a grilling interview, you are tired and can't really have an actual conversation.
3. You have interviews at their office which again are designed to grill the candidate and don't offer any time for the candidate to get to know the people on a personal level.
I used to wish there was a way I could talk to an engineer in a company over coffee (and I am not talking about the whole lunch interview thing that a lot of companies do) and figure out what they actually do, what they want in a candidate and what sort of skill sets that they are looking for. Over the past few months, I have come to the realization that I am not sure many companies actually know the answer to that and all they are trying to do is to get the "best" without actually properly defining what that even means.