As an Indian, who lived in the US for a while and now back in India, this isn't surprising at all. For a foreigner who deals with working systems mostly, I can see how this is hair-tearingly painful, and it was for me when I returned for the first six months or so, but then, one makes peace with it - what choice does one have? :-|

While we are ranting, here's one of mine - it does not involve international payments or any such "usual suspects" of bureaucratic morass.

Warning: very long rant
TL;DR - my chances at working for (what was then) my dream employer foiled by incompetent HR exec and the companies unwillingness to be accessible on phone.

A few years back (I was already back in India), a friend of mine, working for Google Mountain View, submitted my resume to their internal HR system as a hiring lead. Initially Mountain View handled the process directly from the US, and I had 5 rounds of telephonic interviews. The interviews were intense, and amazingly fun. Each lasted between 1.5 to 2 hours - during one, my interviewer challenged me repeatedly into rearchitechtecting the entire Youtube stack. Another interviewer told me at the end, "I hope I get to have you as a collegue soon". A third one, when I thanked him at the end for taking the time out to thank me, told me - "No, the pleasure was entirely mine. Its rare for me to have enjoyed an interview so much". Needless to say, I thought I'd done really well.

After this, I guess my file was transferred to Google India (Bangalore). Instantly the entire "feel" of the process changed. While earlier all phone calls, emails etc were polite, well written, clear and quick, now things flipped. This google HR exec - responsible for my file, initiates her first contact with me not with a phone call, or email, but as a "xyz@google.com wants to be able to chat with you" request on gtalk. No introduction, no idea who she is. I generally refuse requests that I am not expecting, but here I guessed that the person was a google employee and thus this could possibly be related to the interviewing process and accepted the request. I also sent her an email asking her about this and to let her know that the place where I was working at that time blocked gtalk (for good reason) but I had a personal blackberry so it would be better to communicate over a phone call or email rather than over gtalk IM. This mail went unanswered.

A few days later, I return from work to see a message from the HR exec saying "are you there?" on my gtalk window from earlier in the day. I see she is no longer online. I again drop her an email restating preference for email/phone. No answer yet again. She has never given me a phone number I can call so there is nothing else I can do. Google-ing also does not give me a phone number I can call either.

About 10 days go by, suddenly I receive an email from her, this time simply stating, with no preamble:

"I am arranging for you to travel to Google Bangalore for face to face interview on $date. I am booking flights for you to travel...."

This is accompanied by departure times of flights from my place of residence to Bangalore and back on the same day. The trouble is, the flight time each was is 2 hours, and she is arranging a flight that departs at 4:30AM, reaching 6:30AM to Bangalore, me arriving at Goog Bangalore office @ 9AM (yes, Bangalore traffic is THAT bad) and then return flight at 8pm. TO catch the 4:30AM departure, means I'd need to be at the airport latest by 3:00-3:15AM, which means I'd need to leave home by 2AM. That implied not sleeping at all the entire night. Having done interviews before while not having slept the previous night, I did not want to do this and told her that I'd rather fly in the previous evening, spend the night at a hotel in Bangalore, and then attend the interviews the next day. I even find an itinerary from the same online travel site she had used that would suit me perfectly, and was quite a bit cheaper, easily covering the cost of an overnight stay in a cheap hotel. No replies for a whole week. She does leave me messages "r u thr?" on gtalk a couple times which of course I am unable to respond to.

Then she gets back saying to me saying they didn't provide hotel stays at all (I know for a fact this wasn't true then, and it isn't true now). I immidiately reply again insisting that I'd not do interviews without having slept the previous night. I expressed surprise that google did not arrange for a stay in such circumstances, but then proposed to arrange for my overnight stay at my own cost if she'd just take care of the flight bookings as per my previous recommendations. Yet again I fail to hear from her for a week, except for one "r u there?" message during the week on gtalk. Each such message I respond with "I can't access gtalk during the day, could you please call or email instead" - these continue to be ignored.

Then she sends in an email, no content, just a flight itinerary and a hotel stay voucher attached as pdfs in the email. She has, in her infinite wisdom, booked me on that same 4:30AM flight that I did not want to take, but the gem is this: instead of having me fly back the same day, after the interviews on the 8:00pm flight, she had booked me on a 10AM flight the next day, and she has booked me a hotel room for me to spend the night in, AFTER having done the interviews. Both of these are already paid for.

At this stage I am having serious second thoughts about working for Google India, and am tired of the whole thing. I just decide to go with it. So I tell her simply that her itinerary was alright with me - certainly a mistake now that I look back upon the whole thing, but at that time she had had me totally worn down with her failure to communicate. So she replies, tells me she will have a taxicab waiting to pick me up from the airport on my arrival and to bring me to google. she finally gives me "her" cell number. I reply back asking for the address I am supposed to arrive at and the contact number of the cab company cause pickups at the bangalore airport were really chaotic. She doesn't reply. I try calling her, she doesn't pick. I text her, she doesn't respond.

D-day arrives. I try to sleep on the plane as much as I can. I arrive at the airport, find the cabby and we swing out of the airport. The cabby asks me - "so where am I supposed to take you?". I told him I was interviewing and lacking any other information, to take me to the google "office". He says there were six "google offices" in Bangalore. I try calling the HR exec, phone goes unpicked. After about a dozen tries, I simply tell the driver to take me to the "biggest" one guessing that largest office would probably be the engineering location, while others being possibly sales or corporate. He takes me to this large building which possible holds 800-1000 employees, entirely occupied by google. I goto the reception, and tell them I was there to interview, tell them the name of the HR exec who I was in touch with. At her name, the two people at the reception share a "look". It takes them about 45 minutes to find out that I am supposed to be at another location, they again call me a taxi, and off I goto another location. Repeat. Now I am at the third location, its past noon. I finally get to meet this HR exec and I am so mentally tired and angry that I just barely manage to maintain my civility. She takes me to a meeting room and the wait for the first interviewer begins. He comes in, 45 minutes later, looks rushed, tells me he had been given the wrong floor and meeting room number and that "there was a whole mess". We start the interview, by the end of which even he notices that my eyes are swollen and red - he asks me and I give him a brief recap. He doesn't say anything in response. I can tell I haven't done well at the interview, and at that stage I am beyond caring. In any case, I can't imagine working for a company (and here I mean Google Bangalore, not Google as a whole) that has its head stuck so far up its a. The interviewer leaves, I have another interviewer come in, I do a bit better here, but I am basically only half awake by now. There is no talk of lunch.

to be continued...