So, this is kind of a long story about my experience with recruiting at Twitter over a period of more than a year.
About over a year ago now, a Twitter recruiter reached out to me. We did the initial screen, and arranged a technical phone screen. The technical seemed to go fine. It was some coding and machine learning questions. I would have guessed that I passes it, but you never know. A few days later I got an email from the recruiter saying that I didn't pass the technical and that they wouldn't proceed with the process. OK, that's fine.
A month later, I received another email from a different recruiter at Twitter asking me for times to schedule my technical phone screen. This was a surprise of course, since I had been told I had failed the other screen, and I'd never heard of Twitter doing 're-do' technical phone interviews. Anyway, I gave her some times I was available, and she scheduled a phone interview with an engineer. That one went as well as the first, which again seemed fine. A week later, I got a congratulatory email from the second recruiter, saying I passed the phone screen and I was moving on to an onsite. So, we arranged that. Before the onsite, I asked who I would interview with, and what teams I was interviewing for. She said she didn't know, but that I would be told when I came in. This was a bit sketchy. As a candidate, interviewing is time-consuming, and on-sites even more so. If I was interviewing for teams I didn't want to work on, I was going to be waisting my time. But I went along with it.
During the on-site, I never learned who which teams I was interviewing for. I asked the welcoming recruiter, and they didn't know. I asked each of the interviewers, and they didn't know. I left the building and still didn't know which teams I was interviewing for.
After that, there was just radio silence. No more emails from Twitter for about a year.
A few months ago, about a year after the previous onsite, I got another feeler email from a new recruiter. They said that they had my resume on file and they had some teams that were interested in talking with me. We spoke on the phone and I was strait with the recruiter about my previous onsite experience. In response, he said that they definitely make sure they everyone knows what role they're interviewing for and that he thought that it was unlikely that that happened. Not really an apology, more telling me that my story wasn't true. Ugh, OK, fine. Anyway, I gave them my availability for technical phone calls, and waited.
Then radio silence again. That was a few months ago.
Now, my story is bad enough, but I have two other friends and former co-workers who have gone through the Twitter on-site process and have similar stories, one a SWE and the other a front-end dev/designer. They came to to the Twitter office in SF not really knowing what role they were interviewing for, left the in-site not knowing what role they were interviewing for, and then never heard back. This seems to be a common pattern.
