Sonos interview questions

Applied online for software engineering position for networking team. One of the engineers reached out for a video phone interview. Discussion regarding background and position in general. After this phone interview, they wanted to setup a second video phone interview with another engineer. The second phone interview involved a very simple coding challenge using collabedit with discussion around testing etc. The feedback was positive and they wanted to proceed with on-site interview. This is where things started to get weird. The initial position I applied for was listed at Seattle. But I was asked to fly into Boston to get a "better interview experience". When I probed further asking why I couldn't interview at Seattle, I got to know that most of the networking team is based in Boston and a remaining engineers are spread across the other two sites (Santa Barbara and Seattle). There were no clear explanations offered about the team structure, who my hiring manager was going to be and where would he/she be located. It appeared that Sonos believes in having a distributed team across the 3 sites who would use videoconferencing (VC) for conducting meetings. While VCs have come a long way, they are certainly no substitute for face-to-face interactions with peers, hallway conversations, soundboarding etc. There is a lot of value to these especially when it comes to solving very hard engineering problems. Anyway, I eventually interviewed at the Seattle office. The on-site interviews started at 8:30 in the morning and ended at 4:27 pm, even though the actual end time was supposed to be 4pm. The interviews were spread across multiple 1-1 rounds with some being over VC with engineers from the other two offices (Boston, Santa Barbara) and some being in person with engineers at Seattle. Coding was over whiteboard + coderpad (laptop with screen shared) One common theme during the interviews was that the interviewers had surprisingly different answers to one common question "In the WiFi networking stack, is the team more focused on working on the host/device driver portion OR more into the low-level WiFi firmware (including MAC and PHY)? ". Some of them claimed that the team worked on everything on the stack, while some claimed that the team only worked on the OS(Linux)/device driver portion and upper layers (application, userspace). This misalignment was a huge red flag. If the team was misaligned in answering such a simple question, how can they expect to do quality work when sitting across three remote sites? The interview questions were not that hard, but the sheer length of the interview process drained me towards the last two rounds. They could have easily conducted the interviews in a 2-1 fashion and get done with the whole thing in under 5 hours. I am not sure how much you are going to learn about the candidate after he is mentally exhausted towards the end of the day.