Got a call from hiring manager. It was a very good call where we spoke about our experience and expectations. A few video confs (VCs) were set up for next day, for which I had to go to an office that had Cisco Telepresence facility. These talks went went really well but a couple of discussions were 30-45 mins each which I thought was too short to judge anybody. Anyways, Interviews were technical (duh :-)) and one of the interviewers wondered that I being a senior, if I remembered data structures and algorithms! I asked him to find out and he asked me a few problems on BSTs and linked lists.
A few more discussions were set up for the next day as well during the middle of the day (had to agree to this odd hour on hiring manager's request as conf room was all booked otherwise). As I got ready to leave my office at around noon for the interviews I happened to check my mail and saw that interviews were cancelled! Staffing coordinator sent a mail in the morning saying that interviews have been cancelled. Lucky me! Thank goodness I checked my mail else I would have wasted couple of hours in horrible traffic. Now, I would expect such important information to have been conveyed through phone. I expressed my concern about this to hr and I was told that they tried calling me 3 times but i didn't answer! Seriously, they want to believe this, especially when my phone was with me since morning and it didn't ring once and also, no missed calls. Tricks that hr plays :-( (more below about this)
Anyway, these VCs were rescheduled and they went really well. Later they called me f2f to Bangalore, and I was told that i have to purchase flight tickets and file for reimbursement later. I would have rather hr make travel arrangements and not worry about reimbursement as it could be a hassle, which I discovered later. Anyway, flew to B'lore and had a great day of very good quality technical interviews. People treated me with respect and quality of interviews were also good. Couple of interviews I really enjoyed as they talked about multiple problems on algorithms and I love algorithms :-)
After I returned from b'lore, I had one more VC which went well but the panel thought there was misalignment of experience with expectations. But I really liked their honesty and quick feedback.
Coming back to hr and poor candidate experience, they have left no stone unturned to make sure that i have a negative experience, undoing all the good work of engineering team who took such great interviews. I was expected to send hard copies of all the bills and boarding passes by snail mail to cisco bangalore for getting reimbursement!! Starting thinking about why did I accept to make my own travel arrangements and go through this suffering and pain. Even a govt office in india accepts scanned copies but not a technology company that revolutionized internet :-) Also, I have interviewed with a few more companies in b'lore recently but none of them asked for boarding passes - soft copy of invoice was enough. Needless to say, I had only one boarding pass with me and the other one i had misplaced/lost. I called the staffing coordinator to discuss about cutting out this inane process but was cut short immediately and told that there is nothing to discuss and everything would be done as per the email that was sent to me earlier about reimbursement process. My goodness, this was just like the scripted reply you get when you call a customer call center when your washing machine goes bad :-) When I protested, she said she is busy and will call back later. Needless to say, that never happened and I sent email inquiry to her (whose name i am tempted to take for all the humiliation i had to suffer but I'll resist) but no response for 3 days. I shudder to think that if a person with 17 years of experience who interviewed for a very senior position is treated with such disregard by hiring staff, what about the junior folks? A great company like Cisco is surely being maligned by such (ill)actions.
I am going to give this interview experience a negative, despite great technical interviews and respect I got from engineering staff, just because of immature and insensitive recruiters who don't understand that a) its their full time job, b) they represent the company brand. Sincere apologies to the hiring manager.