My resume was passed through a referral, and I was directly called for an onsite interview at their San Jose office.

Right from the start, this was a disaster. The hiring manager directly called me and set up the interview: "Can you come tomorrow?" I asked for a couple of days more to study and set up the interview for Friday. There was no process to it: no confirmation email, no job description sent, nothing.

There were four 45-minute interviews. The first one was probably the only nice guy. The second interviewer was a manager from another team. He was chatting while I was explaining on the whiteboard. I could hear notification sounds. At one point, he stopped me and said, "Hold on. Let me tell these guys I'm in an interview." I mean, please show at least some professionalism when you are interviewing someone.

All four interviewers were constantly IMing on their phones. I'm not sure if they were exchanging notes or if it was a personal conversation.

As a senior engineer, I've been on the other side taking interviews, and I make it a point not to take my laptop and not take my phone out of my pocket. In many cases, the interviewee is already tense, and it's my duty as an interviewer to show professionalism, listen to them, guide them, make them feel comfortable, and try to show them how great a workplace this is.

Sorry, but IMing, speaking on the phone, etc., shows the exact opposite.

The final interview was with the hiring manager. It ended around 12:30 PM, and he asked me, "Did you have lunch?" I replied, "Uh, no." He then said, "Okay, you have two options. You can go home and eat, or I can take you to the cafeteria."

My interviews hadn't gone well, so I knew I wasn't getting the position, but if any hiring manager asked me for lunch, how could I say no? So, we went to the cafeteria and picked up something. He looked at his watch and told me, "Okay, I have another meeting in 10 minutes, so we need to finish this fast." Are you kidding me? Why did you even give me the option? You should have just escorted me out instead.

I've given approximately 5-7 interviews in the last month, and this was the second worst interview process. PayPal, if you need good engineers, take a deep look at your interview process and train your interviewers.

Past projects:

• Find the unique element in an array where all other elements are repeating twice.
• Connect 4 game implementation.
• Other basic Java questions.