Had a recruiter who kept sending me ping emails every month or so. After several months I responded with my canned "don't bother unless you can meet these criteria" message (things like relocation being a non-starter, salary and equity requirements, industries I won't work in, etc). He said he thought they could clear the bar on these issues and I ended doing a quick chat with a hiring manager about 2 weeks later, followed by a tech screen 2 weeks after that, and then another phone conversation about moving forward with an in-person interview a week and a half after that.
So at this point it's a month and a half after my first response to the recruiter and I'm waiting on FB to schedule the in-person. At this point it's right before the July 4th holiday, so I figure it's not unreasonable if it takes a bit to get the scheduling together.
I spend 3 weeks waiting before I get an email stating that they lost someone on their recruiting team, lost track of ME, and asking if I still want to come in for an in-person in the next couple of weeks. OK then.
I said sure. The next day I get an email tentatively scheduling my on-site for another 2 weeks in the future. Along with that I get a flurry of mostly automated emails asking me for all sorts of information needed for travel arrangements. I live in Seattle. The on-site is in Redmond. I point out that I don't need travel accommodations, although I'm kind of sad I didn't just leave it, just to see if they were able to book a flight from SEATAC to SEATAC.
One thing I asked about before the on-site was whether I could bring in a laptop to do coding questions on. My handwriting is bad and my hand tends to cramp up after a few hours holding dry-erase markers, and I generally prefer to use an editor while coding. I was told that while I wouldn't be allowed to bring my own device on-site, they had the option for candidates to do problems either on a whiteboard or on a company provided laptop for that purpose.
Finally on the day of the interview I go in and do the thing. It's the standard "large tech company" interview cycle, where you spend an hour or so with different people, each one tasked with evaluating some aspect of your abilities.
Right off the bat I was told that there was an issue with the interviewee computers and that I wouldn't be able to use one, for coding problems or otherwise.
Most of the sessions involved me spending most of my time at the whiteboard, except for one case where I was talking to someone who was in an SF office over a video conference connection.
He exclusively asked the soft questions like "Tell me about something you did that you were particularly proud of". The questions were pretty familiar because they're the kind I tend to ask when I've done no prep for an interview. That might seem harsh, but during the back and forth I got several other signals that he really hadn't done *anything* to research me. I'm not exactly famous or anything, but I have written a book specifically related to the work Facebook Reality Labs does. If you google my full name, you are immediately presented with my LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter and Amazon profiles, all of which contain a fountain of information you could use to personalize an interview session.
After the interview I didn't hear back for a full week, at which point they said they wouldn't be moving forward. Unusually, the recruiter did specify that the feedback had been mixed, and that the negatives had come from the two design oriented segments of the interview.
Overall it wasn't a horrific experience, but I'm still rating it a negative because
* frequent delays
* "losing track of me"
* trying to setup travel arrangements for a local candidate
* setting expectations of interview conditions (being able to code on a computer) and then breaking them on the day
* no one, especially the "soft questions" guy, appeared to have any idea who I was or made any reference to my existing history in or contributions to VR