I applied to an ad on Indeed from one of the ancillary teams outside of what they call "R&D" and was put in contact with the hiring manager pretty quickly. We had a very pleasant chat, and I was scheduled for a follow-up call with another team member after that.

The second call was a bit awkward and stilted, but I felt like we got through it okay. My suspicions were confirmed with a request to set up a "virtual onsite" round shortly thereafter. It was at this point that things started to trend consistently downward.

Right off the bat, my panel for the virtual onsite was 100% male. In a company the size of Twilio, this simply should not ever happen. In a company the size of Twilio that makes a very big public deal about their "diversity" efforts, this is flat-out fishy.

The Zoom panel included a second chat with the hiring manager, who again was perfectly pleasant and professional. He asked me good questions, listened to my answers, and asked follow-up questions that proved he had actually understood my answers, much in the way you would expect an adult human being to be able to do. There really shouldn't be anything remarkable about this whatsoever, but unfortunately, he would prove to be the only person I spoke to at Twilio that day who exhibited these miraculous abilities.

Everyone else was profoundly distracted and simply reading things off of a script they clearly had no interest in. Two of the gentlemen I spoke with flat-out said they didn't know who I was or what they were supposed to talk to me about the second they signed on to Zoom. They were all staring off at something else as I tried to engage with them. They paid no real attention to anything that I said in response to their questions. One of them literally sat there twirling his heavily waxed mustache like some nefarious cartoon steamboat captain from the 1930s, as he just said, "Mmmhmmm Mmmmhmmm Mmmmhmmm" over and over again until he saw that I had stopped talking, so it must be his turn to blurt out something again. This particular individual was exceptionally arrogant, dodged every question I asked him with stories that had nothing to do with what I had asked him, and he made it extremely clear that he harbored a great deal of resentment toward the team and was in business for no one but himself as a member of it. I pushed on to the end as politely as I could, but I was pretty checked out after the first 30 seconds of my final round with him.

And therein lies the problem with companies that are much larger than they probably should be. I know there are genuinely great teams inside of Twilio, but whether or not you happen to interview with one of the great ones is going to have a profound impact on your interview experience there. I got a real dud. Hopefully, you won't.

STAR textbook stuff. "Tell me about a time when..." yadda yadda yadda.