Defining the position is an interesting challenge. I've certainly been frustrated as a candidate in the past. I've been through eight hour technical interviews, going from dev to manager to dev for an hour each, solving math puzzles, traversing trees, coding up design patterns, optimizing sql, and realizing, at the end of the day, that after eight hours I actually have no idea what the company does beyond the questions I asked and the material I read on their website. Part of the problem was that the interviewers weren't coordinating well, so everyone was pretty much just hammering me with tech questions. Hell, at lunch someone thought it would be clever to ask me how to swap two integers without creating a third integer.

Here's the thing - I actually do understand why companies do this. Many well funded, established companies are just in a state of constant recruitment. If you can solve math problems, write efficient data structures, optimize sql, withstand the pressure of coding on the spot, and seem like a pleasant enough person to be around, they'll have something for you to do. Hire. Step 1 to tech recruitment is to constantly scan who is on the market, identify those who have good credentials and can withstand brutal technical screenings, and make sure you hire them before facebook and google do. You have a few weeks to do this. Step 2 is to define the position you are looking for, and if you wait too long, you won't have time to do step 1. It actually does make some sense.

I would recommend a happy medium, because I really didn't want to work for that company after a day of wind sprints, never knowing where I was going or why I was going there. I think that what they want, and get, is whip-smart people who live for technical problems, with perhaps less emphasis on the business context.