When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain some of the logic behind it. I'm not saying this logic is valid, but it's how we got here, imho.

First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager, so they also need to interview you too and have a say.

Second: Is it really fair to have just one or two developers evaluate you? When I first was an interviewer, I liked everybody! I would have hired them all. So getting multiple data points matters. Best to have at least a couple dev interviews.

Then there's the whole problem of needing to evaluate you on multiple dimensions. Can one interview really tell if you're good problem solving, coding, algorithms/data structures, and any specialization the role has? What about the soft skills aspect? We're going to need to have at least 3 or 4 interviews to cover all these aspects. These roles pay a huge sum of money, so there's a lot of worry that someone will be hired who doesn't really meet the bar, you know?

But now we have a bigger problem: if we're going to invest 4+ people to spend an hour of time with you each, we'd better have some data points that you're worth that investment. So maybe we need one or two initial interviews ahead of time to weed out any obviously unlikely candidates.

After that, it's every other company going "Oh shit, Amazon does 6 interviews? We should do that too!".

Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media. Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz? "Culture fit"?

Tech companies have the lowest infrastructure costs of any industry, and so they have no place to hang their risk aversive paranoia except on personnel (the safer you are, the more trivial the things you fear).

There's nothing logical about it, but since they have to fear something, it'll be whatever some douchebag with a following puts in their next "XYZ considered harmful" blog post.

Hiring manager here. IMO the current tech hiring norms are gross and not sustainable. It feels like a weird hazing ritual and with the current market, is the single biggest reason you can't hire. Why on earth would someone burn a weekend on a take-home test for your startup when they have 15 other irons in the fire? At my current employer we got rid of all that ridiculousness. No take home test. No live coding. We've gotten the whole process down to a few hours over a few days. I'd like to think it's a mutually respectful process.

I think it's time we accept that the person we are talking to is who they say they are on their resume. You don't see accountants balancing books before they get hired. Why should this be any different? If you aren't who you say you are, its either blatantly obvious in the interview or we'll find out when you join and we'll try to correct or part ways. This is like pretty much any other job out there.

Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. It has been like that for at least 7-8 years (probably more) but I just found out that not all companies are like that. After being subjected to these demeaning Leetcoding interviews I went through a refreshingly pleasant experience. It was an interview with just one person. They gave me a technical open-ended problem and two weeks time. After two weeks I had to do a presentation to them how I would solve that problem. Not much more was required. I could choose to do as little or as much as I'd like. I did have to spend around 30 hours researching that problem as it was an unfamiliar problem space for me. The presentation was just 1 hour session with the hiring manager where he and I had a technical discussion about my solution. No more interviews of any kind (not even behavioral). I had an offer three days later. I thanked the manager for his meaningful and humane interview process. I can't believe I have wasted hundreds of hours doing LeetCode when there are companies out there that treat candidates respectfully rather than code churning machines.

Too many people got into this industry, and too many people were able to easily switch between companies and boost their salaries absurd amounts. The big boys decided to use interview grinds to reduce turnover (that's why they all more or less have the same process) and all the people who started companies and came from these companies have been through and assume this process works due to the success of the big boys and they themselves being subjected to it.

The reality is this profession isn't that hard, and majority of people working in it are pretty much just plumbers using the innovations of true computer scientists.

We've managed to created a much more inefficient gatekeeping mechanism than just creating a proper certification process and commended ourselves for it and pretend it's somehow more meritocratic than just getting a comp sci/eng degree and license.

I've built international teams, technical and otherwise, for 20 years and the reality is that unless you are hiring for an extremely specific role with extremely specific requirements, which is almost never the case in reality, any more than 3 interviews is a waste of time. Two within the same team, if relevant, one outside the team.

Furthermore, evaluating anything other than "Do you want to work with this person?" (on a scale of "I'll quit if you hire them" to "I'll quit if you don't hire them") is a waste of time.

But, as you see, people absolutely adore wasting their time and yours, as if no one has anything better to do.

Hire people that your people want to work with. Put them to work and see how it goes. Let go of people that didn't work out. There is no further secret sauce for hiring in nearly every ordinary circumstance.

IMO.

They are trying to find candidates that won't quit once subjected to micromanagement and a culture of constant fire drills, etc.

A proxy for that kind of tolerance is whether the candidate will jump through an inordinate number of hoops while being hazed by future coworkers.

I'm not sure why part time contract style "interviews" aren't more common.

If I ever got into a situation where I was hiring, it would start with a 2 hour conversation. No coding questions. I want to get to know you and also talk shop about applicable technologies.

Then after that is simple. I would hire you to do 5-30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. The interviewer would do the driving to eliminate large amounts of ramp up time. This could be anything from R&D to implementing something real that'll ship to production. This would be paid work of course and the schedule would be based on the interviewee's availability, hopefully at least a few hours a day. The duration depends on how well of a match they are, a better match would have more hours just to filter things over a longer sample size.

The person pairing with them (a currently employed dev / tech lead / CTO, etc.) would be doing this work anyways so it's not a time sink, as opposed to them stopping their "real" work to do 5 technical interviews.

I'm guessing this would give both a good assessment of how the interviewee thinks through problems and you can get a good sense of where they're at technically. Also you get to see how well you mesh together from a "do I want to work with this person every day?" standpoint. It's also super low risk for the company because you don't need to go through the entire costly hiring process up front. It also lets the person interviewing for the job get a better sense of what it'll be like to really work there.

It's a win / win. Why isn't this more popular?

Well I can say in my experience firing people is such a pain nowadays that I feel a need to be a lot more careful in hiring. I've seen a bit more than half of fired employees come back with some form of discrimination lawsuit threat after being fired.

Tech companies are extremely risk adverse when it comes to hiring the "wrong" person. More interviews means more people to spread to blame over if a wrong hire happens. At seven interviews, if everyone signed off on the bad hire, that wasn't anyone's fault, it must have been that the hire was skilled at deception or some other deflection.

As a principal-ish software engineer, I'd be more than happy to do 7 effective interviews/meetings with a promising prospective employer.

Every career move is life-changing, and I want to get as good a sense as I can about the people, environment, and company.

I want to hear from different levels and facets of the company, get a feel for the team members or representative other boots-on-the-ground ICs (what they're like, what the environment is like, how they feel about the company), and also try to see their initial impressions of how I'd fit in.

What doesn't work for that is being on the receiving end of a barrage of "whiteboard this Stanford new-grad shibboleth 'so I can see how you think'".

The current Leetcode interview tells me only a little bit about the company -- and it's negative (but, relativism-wise, I don't fault people much for defaulting to currently popular ideas). But it doesn't tell me much more than that (unless the interviewer is also being rude as they go through the ritual, which would be another negative).

The Leetcode interview also isn't a very effective way for the company to get a sense of what I can do that a second-year CS student probably can't.

The last two places that offered me jobs interviewed me twice each. The one before that, it was a fairly easy half-hour solo technical test, then an interview. I think that's the sweet spot, frankly - a fizzbuzz-level coding challenge and then a single interview to which all stakeholders show up. Maybe two interviews at most, and that's only if you can't get everybody in a room together at the same time. And when I say "all stakeholders," I really mean no more than about 4 people: a peer, a mentor, a boss, and at most one counterpart from another team that interfaces closely with that team, but I digress.

I've never had to put up with more than 2 interviews, and probably wouldn't. But I'm not in the Valley, and I'm generally not applying to the Big Five as it were. You know it occurs to me there's a possibility your recruiter is just over-preparing every candidate to expect the worst. Or who knows, maybe 5 to 7 interviews is normal for clients of that particular recruiter, because they've got a reputation for shoveling idiots through the door? In other words, it seems like there could theoretically exist a recruiter whose clients take their recommendations so seriously that they don't even interview you once!

As someone who's played all roles in this story (candidate, interviewer, hiring manager, person designing the process) I'm going to argue that symmetry is more important than length.

By symmetry, I mean that at any point in the process, you and the company have invested the same amount and learned the same amount. If you're going to give me 5 interviews where I'm answering 90% or 100% of the questions, go away. If you're going to give me 5 interviews, where the first one is the hiring manager mostly telling me about the company and the role, the middle two or three are about 75% me answering, and the last one or two are mostly me getting to know some people I'm going to work with, that does seem long, but at least it's balanced. This is a big decision for the candidate as well, so presumably if the process is fair both the candidate and the company should want a process of the same length

My God, I am so glad to be out of the rat race.

I was chased out, by the very first contacts from companies, or, in a couple of cases, the second contact, being directly hostile and insulting.

I’d assumed that this was because I’m older, and people just wanted me to self-delete from the hiring process (it worked). However, hearing all these nightmare stories makes me think that everyone has to go through that.

If that’s the case, then it’s really just a hazing ritual; preparation for new hires to be pliant and subservient.

The predictive power of a single interview with a single person is just not that high.

For one thing, the company is not the only one doing the interviewing; the candidate is also interviewing the company. Before making a commitment to join a team, I think it's valuable to speak to a number of members of that team to get a sense of what they're like.

On the company side, I have also witnessed several people who might have looked alright in just one interview, but when exposed to several it became clear they were adjusting their story significantly for each interviewer to the point of dishonesty.

There is clearly some line beyond which more interviews would present seriously diminished returns, but I think six or seven interviews, each 30-60 minutes, is much more likely to result in a better outcome for a professional engineering position than just one interview with a hiring manager.

I love reading Hacker News for many reasons, but one of them is to see just HOW different "Silicon Valley/FAANG" mentality is from virtually everywhere else. Where 7 interviews and a full day on-site are seen as normal, productive, and fair to all involved.

FWIW, Where I'm at:

* Right now it's employee's market. I am pushing to have two short interviews with candidates, recruiting is pushing to minimize it to ONE. Otherwise we lose the candidates we most want to get - the highly qualified, ambitious ones who don't have time to waste and have opportunities and options

* We hire to keep. We are not hiring for somebody to do boilerplate for 12 months, stack their resume, and keep going. We are hiring to invest into them - ensure they learn about the business, the functionality, the processes, the system, the stakeholders, the clients, the team members; and perform well and smoothly and for a long time. As such, we find that technical skillset is important, but some of the non-technical skillsets much more so - sense of ownership and commitment, communication and soft skills, etc. So the 3 or 6 or 12 hours of coding problems really don't meet our needs.

I thought Google after a decade basically said - data doesn't support some of these crazy interviewing styles we have become known for. Did industry miss/ignore the data and decided to double down on making interviews more and more onerous, and more and more filtering out brilliant candidates who don't happen to be able to dedicate days of their lives (or weeks, for the inane interviews which require you to re-memorize your ComSci undergrad) PER OPPORTUNITY which may never hash out?

> "5 to 7 interviews is normal"

Yeah, it's definitely not. I've never done more than 3 interviews, and that was the exceptional case. Vast majority have been either one interview with the hiring manager or two interviews where one is with the immediate hiring manager and the other was with someone more senior within the company.

>I was told "5 to 7 interviews is normal"

Be suspicious when anyone says something is normal in tech that tries to speak about the operations and culture of a vast array of companies, especially recruiters and very especially recruiters who work for recruiting companies.

Tech is a massive industry, and there's enough companies that don't do the normal thing that you can spend only a year at those companies and still have enough companies to remain employed for a lifetime. That's only 45 companies from age 20 to 65 if you only ever work a year at a single company.

That said, 5-7 seems exceptionally high. I've only ever done a max of 4, personally.

It hasn't, and isn't.

IMHO, if a company cannot execute a hire in three interviews (or generally less), there are serious structural issues that one should steer clear of.

That said - the applicant screening process is where the most significant work-multiplication value lies; to this end, I cannot stress the significance of writing and communications skills with regard to the quality of a CV / resume. If the execution in this area is poor, it will be poor elsewhere. This is one's pitch deck, of sorts.

Frankly, there is a more critical question IMHO than (the existence or quality of) one's university degree or developer skill set: can a prospective hire with relevant experience and a history of execution be put in front of clients, co-workers and investors to communicate concisely and clearly?

Answer: they can certainly start with selling themselves during the interview process.

With the right hire, it can then be possible that requirements gathering is better defined, technical documentation is accurate, and work sizing becomes an exercise in clear communication of risk. It also makes culture fit a much simpler proposition.

> How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive?

Because hiring the wrong person becomes a colossal waste of time and money.

Google had looked at some internal data and decided that after four interviews, you don't really get any increase in signal: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/google-rule-of-four/

Yeah I have 16 years experience and was asked to take an aptitude (IQ) test. I find it personally insulting.

I think it all emerged from the recruiting/HR market. They started as middlemen but found a way to take on more of the "gatekeeping" role in hiring.

This then lead to recruiters using more and more technical jargon and then we saw the emergence of leetcode interviews trend from faang, and multiple stupid interviews, because it's the trend.

I think it really depends on where you're interviewing, especially now that lots of places are desperate to find people. Sure, at the big FAANG companies you still have to jump through a lot of hoops, but at newer, smaller companies they seem (in my recent experience, anyway) to be much more willing to hire after 2 or 3 interviews (phone interviews even). The place where I'm working now I had a total of 3 phone interviews (not in person due to covid, plus it's a completely remote company). The 3rd interview was with the CTO. He basically said: "It's really hard to find people to hire right now. We'd like to hire you, do you have any questions for me?"

I entered the software industry as a developer about 4 years ago, and I have been running interviews for the past 2 years or so. Interview hell is all I have ever known.

Could you elaborate on how things worked differently in the past? I legitimately have no idea what a developer interview "loop" would look like without 5 to 7 interviews, but I desperately hope it can exist.

You're not out of touch, the industry is.

I firmly believe that nobody knows what they are doing when it comes to hiring and everyone is just following each other.

It's as if interview loops are so long winded that only the ones with enough willpower/endurance survive. They also tend to expand so much time that each company is hopeful to find a better candidate in that duration. Yet corporations don't tend to take into account optimal stopping into their hiring practices and end with less than ideal candidates or come out with no candidate at all.

Personally I think more companies should hire faster and improve their performance evaluation processes to fire faster. It shouldn't take more than 2-3 interviews to get enough "data points" that someone has potential to grow in the position. Especially at this level of pay and responsibility, you should have something online to show you're competent already. Everything else is corporatism and appeasing the social agenda.

Some big tech companies you can get hired and never get fired. Other companies you can get PIP'd although you'd be a 10x contributor at another big tech company. The goal posts will continue to move as tech jobs become more accessible to the world. I think that's a good thing, but I think we should challenge what is normal to land a job in the first place. 5-7 is ridiculous and costly for all parties involved.

Because they can. There’s way too many of us, so the expectation has changed from ‘trainable’ to ‘pre-trained’. It keeps changing too. Just 5 years ago, hiring was mostly leetcode from junior to principal. Now I think it’s changing again, but I don’t know what to. I’ve found that developer productivity is mostly determined by facility with the DevOps tools and frameworks. I hate to say that because it turns hiring into buzzword bingo, and this has become impossibly complex.

In the dark ages, I did coding and systems work for a large money center bank. Hiring back then was at most three interviews - a team member, manager and perhaps the next manager up. There were no "tests," though pertinent questions were asked - often related to the hardware/development environment and familiarity with business and process.

I don't recall any of the people that I worked with directly, or knew from other groups, being incompetent.

I've worked as a software engineer in the US since 2013 and have gone through 12 interview loops in my career. At a typical tech firm, the SWE interview loop consists of:

1 recruiter screen: discussing background with recruiter to make sure your experience is relevant

1-2 phone screens: technical interviews with a SWE to see if it's worthwhile to bring you on site

4-6 on-site interviews: combination of technical and behavior interview sessions

I think product management loops will be similar in terms of length, and so 7 interviews is maybe on the long side but not atypical. PM interviews may include a "take-home project" component before the on-site where you e.g. build a slide deck; this is uncommon for SWE interviews.

Regarding the question "When did a hiring manager lose their authority and the trust of the organization to do their job?", it is very common (and a good idea in my opinion) for interview loops to mostly consist of people who are not on the hiring team. Typically the only future teammate you will see in an interview is the hiring manager (this is not guaranteed; I met my current manager when I started my job). The idea is to have the same bar for all roles at the company instead of inconsistent hiring quality team-by-team.

Hiring today is like meeting your wife after a wedding and just before you go to bed. And there are bigger questions, why we even need resumes if those are disconnected from hiring process and mean nothing except passing trough ATS algorithms. Hiring got broken exactly at the same time when it became separate profession not strictly connected with demand from people who need help with their work. I never fully understood why developer who need help can't hire people directly to help him. Those people would spend together 8 hours a day for at least couple of months if not couple of years and they often meet at the very end. If there's no chemistry between them why hire ? There's lots of talks about scaling and toxicity, but this is result of hiring people who don't talk with each other cause they didn't know they would work together before they got into this big brother show on company island called agile team. What was wrong with this idea of helping each other that worked 15 years ago that established this whole industry ?

There needs to be something like the SAT for computer programming. Getting a 1500 won't mean you're a genius but it will mean you can do the job, and then there can be 1-2 interviews for domain-specific skills and culture fit.

I know many have tried this, some have built great businesses, but nobody has yet become "The Credential" but I do believe this will eventually exist.

You will participate in the hazing rituals and you will submit to humiliation over a several day period. After all, anything less means you aren't fully committed to the corporate vision.

I don't know, but it's a huge problem, and it makes no sense.

Companies are desperate to hire, all they do is complain they can't find anyone. Yet, when it comes to actually hiring they are so afraid of hiring the wrong person, or someone who is faking it, that they put up a huge barrier to entry. Beggars can't be choosers!

I've ranged in everything from 3 interviews to 20* in my tech career. All interviews suck, but the unifying factor I've found for what makes them good is when the company pays you for your time interviewing. I don't so much care about the money, but it's a positive signal that they're invested in me and they aren't just throwing me through more rounds for the sake of putting me through more rounds.

I understand that a higher risk hire demands more validation. What I want communicated from a company though is expectations going in and what format it will be all the way through. I don't mind more as long as I don't get the "hey we're going to put you through 3 more interviews" email.

* For Microsoft oddly enough, but it was a unique situation where I went through both a full design interview and a full eng interview for a hybrid role.

Sadly, 5-7 interviews are quite common. I think this is because of a few factors:

- Instituting a multi-round interview process makes the company feel like it's very selective and hires only the best. This also discourages 'shoppers'.

- It is perceived to be more 'democratic': if there are 5-6 people in the team plus one manager, by giving everyone the chance to interview and weigh in on the hiring decision, it will be felt that everyone has got a say in who they work with. Plus it now becomes a collective decision owned by the team: if they hire a dud, they have no one but themselves to blame and they still have to work with him and produce results. This will reduce the incentive to hire someone less skilled (no one will admit that it will also reduce the incentive to hire someone more skilled or with a different background that is not easily evaluated).

FAANGs started doing tons of interviews so everyone else did too. Today I'll get a "behavioral interview" from a small company that is totally unstructured and I end up controlling the interview because the interviewer is unprepared. Whereas for a FAANG I just need to have scripted responses to a series of 30 to 50 commonly asked questions.

I'm happy that they are doing more to try to ensure they get the right candidate. It's very easy with just one or two interviews to miss a great candidate who was nervous, or miss a confident candidate who is a terrible fit.

However, these additional rounds are no guarantee you won't get a bad match. It depends on who's interviewing and what basis they're going off of, and whether the interviewee has done prep work. As per usual, it's not the process that matters, but the people doing the process.

I have been trying for the past two years to bring our team's down from 2 + work sample to work sample + 1. All my effort has been stymied by an increasingly bureaucratic and "empowered" HR department that wants to standardize on 3 + work sample + test day company-wide. It's driving me insane just to keep the status quo.

We are not a FAANG, not in the US, do not and cannot offer SV salaries. They just do not understand one of the best things we can offer is less bullshit and a bigger chance for people with skills but not traditional backgrounds. So instead I have an endless line of young men who kind of know how to add a new JPA repository to a Spring application, and an MSci in some easy-to-get-an-EU-grant area, and we actually spend hours time on each one instead of asking them to code first.

It isn't. Over time you will notice that counter parties in negotiation will often use "normal" or "industry standard" argument to achieve their goals. Sadly for commodities the enforcement machinery cannot usually accommodate variation anyway. The best option is to walk away.

TL;DR - you can say no to the people who have normalized that, and still be highly successful

With the emergence of Google, et al, and the image of being elite, so came the emergence of nonsense like this: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/here-are-all-the-docume.... Getting butts in seats and long processes have replaced getting to know people before hiring them. The burden has been put on the candidate by the process.

I'm with you, OP. I remember the days of simpler processes. After going through the hoops of 5+ interview rounds in 2019 and 2020, I decided to apply limits to what I was willing to do for interviews. For example; I won't do leetcode, I won't enter a process with more than three steps, I won't give more than 5 hours to a process. This has significantly reduced the number of positions available to me, but the positive result is that the positions that do fit into my ruleset are high-quality, smaller companies, with more upside than the larger companies. I find that the companies that do fit into my ruleset about interviews actually want to get to know who I am and what I'm bringing, rather than if I'll just fit an open role or some quota. Now I'm not making FAANG salaries nor benefits, but I really enjoy the work I'm doing, the people I'm building with, and I'm very well taken care of financially.

Let me provide some color for you. Hiring is changing. It's shifting from "oh this person went to good schools, worked for a top company" (self perpetuating loop) to "can you answer this difficult question in 45 mins?" (more noisy, but less biased estimate).

Now, your question is I feel completely wrong. Meaning ever since I joined the work force (2004), I always had 5-7 interviews.

But that aside, the real deal these days is an effort to unbias the hiring process. Meaning put less weight on the resume. Put more weight on the 0.5-1 day you spend with the candidate during the interview process.

Obviously, you need to ask the right kind of questions to measure technical competence. So the Q&A is also heavily skewed towards job-required skills & knowledge (vs puzzles and such).

For people complaining about 4-6 interviews in tech companies, remember that in a lot of other industries (e.g. finance, consultancy, law) they take into account much more information about you. For example: the school you went to, your GPA, and the company you are currently working at. If these are not what they expected, they won't even interview you. So that's how they can save 1 or 2 interviews: by transferring the filter to your university and companies that hired you.

And I personally think that's bad. I'd rather have to do 2 hours more of interview when I'm changing jobs than have to worry for years during high school and university on a ton of metrics that I'm being evaluated on (the vast majority of which are useless for the job).

Do you mean 7 counting all the 5 or so different sessions during an on-site? Or are you counting the whole on-site day as one?

I’m used to phone screen —> technical screen -> full day many panel on-site. With maybe a take home thrown in there somewhere around the technical screen.

This is why I won't ever work for a FAANG company. I am too old for such shenanigans, and I am not underpaid at my current gig. Plus, I'm spoiled -- every single job in my career (even the first one, LOL) has been a trusted referral. So I usually just sit down with the hiring manager and one of their tech leads (if I'm not interviewing to be the tech lead...) and it's pretty relaxed. Sometimes we just go to a local pub and meet over beers. I'm no 10x developer, but I'm pretty good at cutting out the bullshit, unfucking existing projects, and getting them out the door. A solid track record makes it really easy to get referrals.

When I arrived in the valley in the 90s it was already common. I'm not sure I ever had 7, but multiple interviews over most of a day, with a break to chat over lunch, was the usual thing there. Couldn't say how much further it goes back.

Outside the US (and FAANG specifically), many interviews is perhaps unusual. I haven't had more than two interviews (in four countries, DE/US/GB/CH) in any job in two decades, ever.

Frankly speaking here. (O&G industry so not in IT specifically)

If I interview with you once and I find out that you didn't have sense enough to make sure that you asked all the relevant questions and made sure that I met and interacted with those people who would be working closely with me in that position then the only valid conclusion that I can draw is that you are too bureaucratic or disorganized and that I will have to waste a lot of time at your company or learn to deal with the bullshit. I don't suffer fools very well and from experience, bureaucracy breeds indecision and thrives in environments with no accountability.

In my career I have only interviewed twice with a company on one occasion and in that case I was notified up front that there would be two meetings necessary since one of the managers was out of the country on the date of the first meeting and others in the group would be traveling during the second so they needed to break things into time slots so that everyone could get an opportunity to ask questions, shoot the shit, or whatever. I ended up spending one full work day and part of another interacting with two small groups who could fit the interview into their schedules.

I didn't get that position because I had another offer come in before they could make an offer and I took the other offer.

Don't waste people's time. The hiring company is also being evaluated here and disorganization is not an attractive feature.

It depends on the organization, of course.

At my previous employer an interviewer would go through an interview panel, give a presentation, get taken out to a nice lunch with a few people (which was absolutely another interview), and 1-2 more interview panels followed by a discussion with the director. Each interview panels would have several members of the division (typically 5-6). There was no "hiring manager", intentionally so.

The whole process is more like serious dating leading to potential marriage, but there were good reasons for it. People often work on multiple projects with multiple people, and those projects would end and others begin over time, but the goal was to have people stay. It's really painful to have people leave (because their institutional knowledge left with them). In addition, nobody wanted to have to constantly work with jerks. So the goal was to try to determine if the candidate would be able to work with many other people, and vice versa. We especially wanted to know if candidates were curious (a very good sign) and could explain themselves in a presentation (because that was a common need).

We didn't invite people until we already read something they'd written & talked with them on the phone, so we tried to not invite people until they were a plausible fit.

Nothing is perfect, and it definitely required time from the interviewee, but there were reasons for it.

Recently did 5 interviews, and I liked it. I’d had no issues doing more if needed, just to be on the safe side for both parties.

I guess that when a family doesn’t depend on your job or you are not leaving a good position, it could be OK to join a company after 3 or 4 interviews. But if you have a family or are leaving a good position, there is much more at stake. 7 interviews is not that high of an investment to lower the risk of a bad move, that could have a negative impact on your career and the future of your family.

For my job, this was in 2018, I sent an email with CV, ~90 minutes interview a few days later, had an offer iirc the next day or the one after, then went by once more for negotiating the contract details. Of course I'm skipping the job searching part (that took several weeks and this wasn't my first interview - the area doesn't have that many opportunities for me in the first place and I didn't speak the language), but if you're wondering how many interviews is too many... That's my experience in Germany.

Since then, was approached by and interviewed with another (German) place during the pandemic, had first a video call with the CEO, then a more technical quizzing by three would-be colleagues, then an offer. Seems a little different because they approached me based on online info where they apparently liked what they saw, that might have helped skip a screening step or so.

My girlfriend, also applying for a technical position, had iirc one interview in the German office, then one with the CEO in the headquarters (3h driving; I booked a hotel for us and made it into a weekend trip), then an offer.

Seven seems rather excessive.

There is a trial period here, where you can leave or be fired with like two weeks' notice, for the first three months or so. Unless you're hiring across a border, especially EU borders, that lowers the threshold considerably as you can just "try out" what someone is like without much hassle. Maybe that's different compared to where you live?

This is part of the reason why the last 7 years have been so shit to me. If you burnout and lose your job, it's absurdly difficult to get __any__ new one, even underpaying ones at shit companies that abuse their employees. All it takes is one idiot from marketing to think you answered the same question more vaguely than they would have liked, and 13 hours of interviewing time is out the window. Scale that up to applying at even 5 companies, and you're in the business of causing depression

For higher level jobs (i.e. directors+), 5-7 interview sounds pretty normal for a fairly large organization, and I don't think this has changed much.

1. Recruiter screening

2. Hiring Manager interview/screening

3. Hiring manager + your peer group within your org

4. hiring manager + your peer group outside your org (just because everybody is so busy)

5. Hiring manager + more senior leaders (this could take place before peer group)

6. Individual separate meetings with your future directs (more formality at this point)

Now, if it is a contract role, I will hire just after 1-2 panel interviews depending on level.

It's normal. A company that doesn't do this, unless it's tiny, is a warning sign. Why?

Short answer: It's very difficult to work with incompetent colleagues colleagues.

Long answer: We don't rely on a credentialing process like other fields do. Some people lie on their resumes or embellish their skills. Other people overestimate their skills. As a result, employers have to determine competence in the interview process.

A single coding question is often not enough. At a minimum bias can creep in, but also poor interviewer skill can make a good candidate appear poor, or could allow a poor candidate to pass. Furthermore, often companies need to screen for particular skills that are critical for a given product.

Furthermore, I think it's useful to be exposed to everyone's communication style, and for everyone to be exposed to your communication style. Often that has more to do than just technical competence.

FWIW: My wife is a pediatrician and her job interviews were mostly mutual interest. But, she had to go through a rather intense credentialing process. Our industry doesn't seem to trust credentials for reasons that I never understood, therefore, we tend to rely on employers gauging technical competency instead of a third party gauging technical competency.

I see a lot of responses in here that try to justify the practice using empirical data/logic. What we’re failing to consider is the trade off between “efficiency” and “equitability.”

Just because something is 100% efficient in allocating resources (time, money), doesn’t mean that it’s worth doing. What this thread shows is that somehow, we’ve become sympathetic to megacorps, in winner take all markets, who want to build a world where their time and money is seen as the most valuable.

Instead, we should account for the fact that these companies, with CEOs making $200mm+ per year, should have a civic duty to take on more risk giving people a basic right- access to a job.

Credit card companies aren’t allowed to underwrite based on certain factors heavily correlated with race, religion, or other things (I forget the rest) that were deemed unfair to be judged by. In an efficient world, we would have collectively decided that companies should be able to infer your ability to repay debts based on the zip code you live in, or the college you went to, or the demographics of your friends. It makes sense to not allow this from an equitable standpoint. Why can’t the same be said about hiring people?

Who has the luxury of going through 4 interview rounds? Who has the privilege of studying hours and hours of leetcode? Who has the privilege of staying up to date on the latest web frameworks? I think you get my point.

What won’t surprise me is that the data may suggest the youngest are most suited for many jobs, if one were to judge by interview readiness and performance. If that becomes to norm, would the future version of yourself deem the mechanisms of finding a job market acceptable?

It depends on what you are counting as interviews. Normally there is 1 recruiter/hiring manager initial call. Then there is 1 phone screen of some sort. If you pass that it's normal to have 4 onsite interviews in a day. That gets to 6. Sometimes there is a follow up interview and sometimes you skip the phone screen. I feel like 5-7 is the normal routine. Is there something else you expect?

It is totally normal. Consider

1) recruiting needs an initial chat, to get you excited, do some light screening, and ensure comp expectations aren’t out of whack 2) then the hiring manager has a screen 3) once the hiring manager likes you, then you need to conduct due diligence. As others have echoed, one interview can’t possibly probe on all the key aspects of the job. In our case, we look at growth potential, tactical experience, and 2 case interviews, usually one more qualitative and one more quantitative.

So there’s 6 right there. At the end, you know several things: the candidate is aligned on comp, the hiring manager likes them, other people like them, they can do the job (as reasonably confident as you can be), and they have good upside potential. Hire!

If you cut anything out, you have to sacrifice some aspect - maybe less confidence they can do the job etc. as others have echoed it’s actually hard to fire someone from a practical standpoint esp if they are not obviously terrible, or they’re willing to try. Better to just hold a high bar up front, to minimize risk on back end.

Here's a 2013 article on google's results on evaluating various factors in hiring.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...

Basically, no one really knows how to hire.

I had 6 interviews with Amazon only to be told NO at the end. And I thought I got the jab lol. Then just recently, I was looking to jump to smaller organization. After 5 interviews they told me no. Again I really thought I got the job. So now I am just wondering wtf happened. I got no feedback. They should be paying us for all the wasted time and energy.

I think people here (perhaps not OP) are not all thinking ‘an interview’ is the same thing.

In our company, it’s normal to spend 1/2 - 1 day at the office - or nowadays by video - being interviewed by 5-10 _people_, in sets of 2. It’s been like this for all my 20 years in the industry.

It’s not normal to have to interview on 5-10 different _occasions_ - that would be terrible!

To save everyone’s time, I would have just two interviews progressively. First one explain in detail something that you have been part of building. Second pick and solve a problem from a list of problems that we face, use all the tools you need from the internet book etc but solve along with interviewers as if they need to do this but you need to convince them why it should be done this way.

Put as many engineers as I need to be on these two calls.

That’s it. Anything else is an overkill.

I am looking for someone who given time can play exactly shades of these two kind of roles in my team.

Let rest of the engineers witness as you perform.

Will have prep interview to help you understand the format and not to be intimidated by the number of interviewers or the format.

I have hired in big tech, people who will not pass these two tests get hired.

I don’t care if you remember an algorithm. I need to know that you would be able to research and get to know such algorithm and know why to use that.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually like the current format of 1-2 phone interviews + 4-5 onsite interviews, most of them Leetcode style. All other solutions seem to just increase subjectivity on hiring decisions and make the interview more gameable.

Take home interviews are horrible if you are interviewing for more than one company at a time. It will take a lot of time if you are serious about it, and it will test you much more on how much you dedicate yourself to the problem than on what's your actual skill.

Also the fewer interviews there are, more is the importance of subjective and unjust metrics. I received offers from large (and somewhat good) companies with 1-2 interviews because of my resume. Although I personally benefitted from that, I think it brings a lot of problems for people who went to bad universities/companies, and that is not worth it.

Our company does 5 interviews for a developer position: pre-screen with recruiter, hiring manager, pair programming, tech deep dive and one with one of the founders.

Having been through the process as a candidate and now involved in it as an interviewer, I can’t say that it doesn’t make sense. It is also quite expensive for us as there will be 7 different people involved but that is 7 people who have a say in assessing the candidate.

This allows for a good assessment of the candidate from different perspectives and also to reduce bias from any individual interviewer (conscious our otherwise).

Hiring the wrong person is expensive, even with a probation period. You have to pay a lot of commission to agencies. We have small teams and onboarding someone ties up valuable resources. Hiring someone means other good candidates might have to be turned away after that.

It's because culture-fit is the single most important aspect of any hire

Followed by teachability/ability to learn

Sure, technical ability (in whatever role you're trying to fill/enter) is important, but if you clash with the team(s) you'll be working with, it doesn't matter how "good" you are - as I wrote several years ago[0], "all-star teams" are horrible: what matters is that as a team you can [very close to] "the best".

Having a series of individual interviews can help ensure that no one's inherent bias (pro or con) unduly affects the hiring process

------------

[0] https://antipaucity.com/2014/06/25/who-wants-an-all-star-tea...

I think the answer is that many responsible for recruitment have no idea whether a prospective resource is good/suitable or not, so they need some others to share responsibility for their “sell” (recommendation).

The lack of trust is now everywhere in programming and management, from recruitment to development.

This is unrelated to your question. But, as another degree-less father in tech, I was wondering why you wanted to show your children the importance of a degree. You yourself didn't have one through all of your success. I would argue you wouldn't have been nearly as successful either if you had chosen from the get-go to go the BSBA route. The average BSBA salary seems to hover around 51k, with the top earners making about as much as an entry level dev.

I don't want to be mean, and it's not all about money, I just don't see what value a degree adds for the most part. On the other hand, my son is growing up quickly, and sometimes I wonder if I should teach him that going to college can be worth it. So I really do want to hear it from your perspective.

I think that interviewing is a continuation of office politics with other means (to misquote Clausewitz). An interviewer who will not get along with you is bound to reject you as a candidate (that's what i understood during the last interviewing season)

Shops with very tight hiring processes are in all likelihood bad places to work for, with lots of office politics. A very elaborate hiring process may well be an indication for a general level of mistrust and to some extent an indication for a dysfunctional workplace. I once worked for Amazon, was very happy that they hired me with all their interviews, however the job was a shitthole.

This observation was of great benefit to me, now I don't fret over a rejection. Believe me, it's just not worth the worry.

Well my hypothesis is that there is too much talent applying to each offer. So companies have to build a process that evaluates all candidates to be sure they only hire the best according to them. It's FOMO.

In the past company I was working, they boasted off only hiring the best, and having like 5 interviews, skipping tons of candidate. And the one they were hiring at the end were consistently worse developers and product managers than average.

I don't think that skill of tech employees is strongly linked to company performance (but I have no data on it). Meaning hiring the best developers will not impact the financial metrics of a company. As a result of that it doesn't really matter if your hiring process is performant or not

1) Talk with recruiter

2) Phone Screen

3) 4 tech interviews (2 coding, 2 systems design)

4) 1 behavioral interview, sometimes.

To be honest, this isn't egregious. Given how much we are paid this doesn't seem so bad. Whether or not the coding and systems design questions actually provide signal is a different question though.

I literally cannot think of a job that would be worth going through that. Fortunately, there are plenty of companies that don't do it. They may not be FAANG (which is fine with me, because I'm not interested in FAANG companies), but they do exist.

I applied to a company for two positions and they came back to me saying that I'm suitable for both but if I want to interview for both of them there will be 10 interviews and 2 take home tasks.

The current interview paradigm makes it difficult for engineers to interview at many companies at the same time and get the best offer.

Some companies send you upfront a 2-3h coding test without even talking to you to see if there is a fit.

Interviewing can mean a lot of wasted time and frustration due to lack of feedback and transparency.

I was thinking to create a site to allow rating of interview experiences to prepare people for what's ahead and allow them to assess if their time is well spent. If this sounds something of interest, pm me.

I got 5 interviews add 1 online coding test. But 3 of the 5 are team member interviews and I actually enjoyed a lot. I think it's a lot better than the hierarchical, traditional 5 interviews in which one meets a person higher in hierarchy each time.

My best and it turned out my worst hiring experience as the hiree was when I was reentering the workforce as a dot-com-bust refugee after a few years of self-(un)employment. I was switching to the new language javascript from Java and didn't know much yet. After a nominal phone interview I was called in for a single in-person interview with the founder of a startup and was hired on a probationary basis. After a week I was fired for incompetence in javascript which was quite true however I increased my javascript knowledge that week by an order of magnitude. The cost to the startup was a lot less than disrupting their overburdened devs work to interview me.

My last interview was about 2 years ago. It was single 1.5 hour long interview with the company owner and their CTO. Still contracting to them.

I am an independent vendor, so it was kind of different interview (I develop products for my own company and for hire).

When I was interviewing for a software engineering position in 1994 I had at least 7 interviews over the course of an entire day on site. When I was interviewing for a senior VP position at a large scale web company I had 13 interviews over 2 months. When my company was getting acquired by a different large scale web company I had 6 technical interviews and a couple of non-technical ones. The only time I had fewer interviews was when I was interviewing for my first job at a startup and the entire team was smaller than 7. However, I did talk to the CTO on the phone for 10+ hours before even interviewing at the company formally.

I recently applied for an effectively specialized support job at a FAANG. After filling up a form ~40min, and one technical interview ~1hr, I got an email to congratulate me for moving onto the next stage and to get ready for 5x 1hr interviews.

In NZ where I am from, this is unheard of, so I asked if they were paid interviews and what is the pay range for this job (since it was not discussed at all at this point). They very carefully made sure not to answer any of the questions so I said I won't proceed with my application and gave a bit of feedback that they are looking for desperate people, not talented people.

Ridiculous, they are not worth my time.

This is largely because companies are no longer vested in growing and maturing talent. Used to be that they hired and trained, now that is all on the employee to skill themselves up for the laundry list of things companies want. So instead of training and learning about people and evaluating them as you go, the interviews have become the surrogate for what used to be done while training. You could take any engineer and make them viable, they used to have to because the market was so small. But now they complain about not being able to find good people, because they don't want to put any effort into someone. If we look at this as a human relationship, like if this were how you looked at your spouse or partner, you'd realize you're being a dick and probably just using the partner. This has become normal, but is toxic in the long run. But hey the only way to get a raise is to leave, which is another data point on toxicity and clearly shows the fundamental switch away from healthy relationships and quality organizational building.

I have a feeling that interview processes have become like dating apps - all these leetcode tests and 7+ interviews, however they're justified, are just filtering systems to deal with the sheer number of candidates. Just like dating apps, I think the overall process is more time consuming and less productive for both sides as the signal to noise ratio of the input has decreased tremendously but not too sure what better way there is if we start with the assumption that we can't completely trust the hiring managers.

5 to 7 interviews? Hold my canonical beer : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678

3-5 filtering interviews (not counting recruiter call) with a max distribution around 3 maybe 4 seems the most common I've seen. Very senior (staff+, executive) may skew towards a bit more.

Not really true, there are plenty of jobs with just two interviews. I have withdrawn from some applications where they said 5 or more interviews. The job market is too hot for that bullshit.

I generally get about five interviews when I look for new jobs.

There’s a recruiter/hr phase, a project manager interview, a lead dev interview, engineering lead interview and often a coding challenge.

You’re talking about 6 hours per position. That’s basically a full time job looking for a new job, and if you already have a job to do this is ridiculous.

I generally always go for companies that 1) merge these interviews into three maximum 2) concentrate on the single most important thing: whether we can communicate well while solving a problem.

I kept stats for a couple of years on large numbers of quant financial interviews. Typically up to 15 roughly 30 minute interviews per hired candidate. The probability of getting hired seemed to go to up significantly by interview number until about #7. After that it was flat until the last guy, probably because nobody wanted to say no and contradict the first 10 people. The extra interviews were useful, however, as they helped establish consensus and buy in among the team

Interviews are more thorough because firing became harder.

It used to be that if you hired an employee and found out they aren’t good at their job you could fire them. Today it is complicated and can backfire if the employee believes they were fired because of any reason other than their skills, or were not provided with ample opportunity and support to succeed.

The solution is a lengthier process based on the assumption that once hired, the company is stuck with the employee unless they decide to leave.

Depends on the size of the org and the seniority of the role, but I don't think that 5-7 interviews is "normal". At least in the USA, my experience has been 2-4.

I think that’s because you are looking for a job at FAANG (well it’s MAAAN now but whatever)

Everyone wants to get to those so the process is as it is.

That’s what you get for trying to work at those companies.

Our senior-only contracting firm does five interviews but they aren't formal and do not have any gotchas. We mostly look for integrity (is your resume true) and the ability to be trusted with clients. Any of the five can veto and many do get vetoed for not being technical enough or getting a bad reference from anyone in the group. Getting fired is very rare...almost unheard of. No one has ever been laid off in twenty years.

> When did a hiring manager lose their authority and the trust of the organization to do their job? Am I just out of touch?

If you think that a hiring manager can judge technical skills or culture fit then you are very out of touch. If you dont know that people lie in their CVs you are completely out of touch - must have been very lucky with your career.

And I dont say that so many interviews are good. But again this happened for years.

My current place had a really neat, quick (!) take home assignment as a filter and then a single day of interviewing with 4 phases (about 5 hours total). Obviously it would be nice if interviews were less than that even but I didn't feel like that was onerous. I feel like this is more the norm nowadays than the heights of insanity like 5 years ago but I have a sample size of 1 so...

I had a day of interviews (~7 people) at my first job out of college in 1986, but my hiring manager had also been the person I first talked with at a career fair.

I had a day of interviews (~7 people) in early 2000 at an internet consulting firm, mostly people I worked with directly once I was hired.

Whatever virus those places had, it seems to have spread.

I've also been hired after one or two conversations with one or two key people.

We're all told to treat our running software as livestock, not pets. That means they're disposable, you start and stop them rapidly, etc.

If I'm being very, very kind, this kind of hiring practice means the company wants to treat you like a pet (in the best possible sense) and not livestock.

Probably it has more to do with data-driven decisions to optimize the hiring funnel. Or possibly voodoo.

When did needing to spend a month prepping for interviews become the norm :sadface:

I understand that companies in Silicon Valley have a huge influx of applicants and so the filtering needs to be high, but the way interviewing practices have spread to other parts of the world because of cargo culting is frustrating.

Companies have a hiring crisis but shoot themselves in the foot during the interview process.

Is this the case? I seldom deal with 3 interviews even; though I have been with my current employer for 3 years.

Have things changed that wildly in a couple years? If a company dragged me through 6 interviews I’d automatically assume they weren’t serious / were incredibly unorganized or unprofessional - and I would obviously take it as a red flag.

I'm not sure how a recent trend this is. My father dropped the hiring process at IBM (France) after 3 or 4 interviews in the early 80 because he was told there would was three interviews left. Maybe it's just big company whose management really want to feel secure about their hire (or justify their job, who knows).

Negotiate a 30-day money back guarantee with the firms who send you candidates. They will only send you proven candidates that have been successful elsewhere. Don't bother interviewing or maybe have a one person 30 minute culture sanity check.

I worked at a household name non-tech company and we negotiated such a deal. It worked great.

One reason is its easier to apply for jobs. Previously applying for a job took a lot of time and effort, screening rounds were done on phone so not a good signal. Now you can apply for dozens of jobs quite easily and do interviews while you're "working from home". Which means more applicants for each role.

I have an upcoming all day interview with 7 different people... something like an hour each. The last time I interviewed for a new company had an on-site round robin process used where we interviewed with a lot of different management staff after initial HR interviews. I guess it's been this way for awhile.

I feel like I'm some kind of outlier because I only had one interview for my first perm job, and a phone and in-person for the current one. But both are small companies (not startups, just not behemoths).

Then again I also feel like an outlier round here for not making 500k, so maybe I'm just a failure!

The best people don't work at places with 5-7 interviews. They get offers from other orgs after 1 or 2.

Never. One is the best.

If and if they have a note from the Hiring Manager's Mom would I give ANY employer a second interview.

If you are Talented and they do not hire you on the spot, they are not going to do so. Why? The "A Player" to be named later has a new position within seven (7) days. Period. Get it?

I need to write a longer piece on our approach at Oxide, but for us it takes effort (not always successful!) to hold ourselves to 9 conversations. This may (or perhaps does?) sound obscene, but (1) these are conversations not oral exams (we don't do red-black-trees-on-whiteboards), hopefully making them less stressful for the candidate (2) we take hiring really, really seriously and (3) I have learned from mistakes at past companies with grievous mishires, for which the downside is essentially unlimited. We have a front-loaded, writing-heavy process (we don't schedule conversations with anyone about whom we are less than enthusiastic), so for us, the conversations are an opportunity to really begin to explore what the dynamic with our potentially future colleague will look like. And time and time again, I have been appreciative of this broad approach: because different folks take such different paths in their conversations, it is not unusual for one person to see something that others either missed or didn't dig into -- and that becomes a serious concern. Of course, it also happens that one person has a concern that others have also looked at and feel has been addressed; we aren't necessarily seeking to build absolute consensus all of the time, but it's essential that we ferret out those concerns.

tl;dr: I think you have every right to ask a company what their process is, and when they can expect to be at a decision point -- but I think there are reasons (good reasons!) why companies may wish you to have many conversations before making a hiring decision.

FWIW when I interviewed at Google in 2003 I did seven interviews. When I interviewed at Netflix in 2011 I did eight interviews. A typical Amazon loop these days is six-seven but I hear it's been that way for at least a decade if not more.

So at least for FANNG it's been normal for a while.

That is a good question I believe, it exposes how embedded knowledge software engineers actually have and that wouldn't be something to measure very quick. Every interviewer is likely just trying to confirm if engineer is who he/she claims to be during the application.

You can say no to the people who have normalised this, and still be highly successful in this industry.

The thing I hate about this: when you spend hours and hours in interviews and you get rejected at the last stage the least they could do is to provide some meaningful feedback. But nope. They promise feedback but just ignore you.

I think 3-4 interviews is fine, depending on context.

Because we do silly testing, social tests, and many more test instead of trusting the good old "hire a smart guy by gut feeling + probe (not test) the extend of his knowledge" method.

I am a person who does interviews and I always use this method. Never betrayed me.

I have a similar experience level to your own, and I am equally horrified by today's interview gauntlet.

This, coupled with exploding team sizes and heavy-handed process fads, have left me to consider entrepreneurship as the only viable option from here on out.

As a Vim/Tmux user who lives in the terminal, I absolutely abhor all these coding websites. They do not have all the Vim keybindings I use and my own personal shortcuts I have embedded in muscle memory. It's such a frustrating process.

Seems reasonable enough. You usually have at least that many dates / extended interactions with someone before committing to a 2+ year romantic relationship, and your coworkers have to spend way more time with you than your partner does

Yeah, I had the same Jikes feel when I thought I would try work for a company for once for a bit than start my own; they said ‘we normally conduct 7 interviews over a 3 week period’. So that was it for my experiment working somewhere for now.

It's a red flag, but a punished one. Because if you're looking for jobs it's a race for the competing hiring managers. 7 interviews means these people will be last and getting the candidates that the other managers rejected.

This sounds to me like the place is wacky for "culture fit" or whatever. If you go for remote gigs I can't imagine it gets beyond 2 or 3 interviews, mostly technical, since they won't ever hang out with you anyway.

Ever since we make 10x more than anyone else. Hiring a wrong developer can liquidate a smaller company, and make serious problems for a medium one. Large companies can take it for a while, but it definitely doesn't help.

Asking what the full interview process is at first contact can be telling of the culture and can be used to screen companies as much as looking at tech stack, company size/details, comp, etc.

That many interviews for a PM is ridiculous.

4 to 7 45-minute to 1-hour interviews are the norm for as far as I can remember.

> (never graduated from high school but wanted to show my kids the importance of a degree).

I’m curious about this statement.

What did getting a four year degree after the fact show or create a more compelling argument for traditional college?

Interviews add up quickly:

Initial meeting Tech screening Case study/system design Meeting with upper level manager Meeting with peers Doing 1 last interview on something the team felt was still and open question

When I interviewed at Microsoft for an intern position in 1988, about 7 people interviewed me with coding/puzzle questions. So this style of interviewing has been around for a long, long time.

Btw you don't need to do these. I and a few of my friends have got into FAANG and other companies in the past by having a good network and having really solid work in the past.

I hate this so much. As a dev with over 30 years experience and plenty of personal references, I refuse to be subjected to this time-wasting endeavor.

I suspect many GenXers feel the same . . .

Anyone who can't decide if I'm a decent hire without 5-7 interviews better be ready to pay my hourly consulting rate for all the time they waste on the process.

I’ve been interviewing since 1996. Out of 7 companies I worked for, two I got from knowing the owner/founder, 1 was short, and 4 were >4 hours. This is not new.

OP is not kidding about ‘Blast From The Past’

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9_mi3qoA_QY

You may work at this place for a decade. You giving 1 days’ worth of time for potentially thousands of days of work is small change and a worthwhile investment

I have seen this from 2000. Large corps had 5-7 interviews. Smaller ones then had about 3-4. This is for full-time non-intern roles

Edit: My field is not pure software dev

When a company is considering investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a person, it would be surprising if they wouldn't do at least 7 hours!

When they paid with industry average hourly rate for position and location.

The same is about large test tasks - tests should be small (less than few hours) or paid.

Well to me it’s a lot simpler: the higher the pay, the longer the interviews.

Tech pays really well, I don’t mind taking 7 interviews if I’m paid 500k a year…

Oh brother, wait until you find out about leetcode!

Increasingly ridiculous stuff will get pushed because tech workers refuse to see themselves as members of the proletariat and unionize.

Best of luck. I have no idea how to get hired. I jumped shipped from my last employer in May of 2020 thinking I'd take a 2 month break and then start interviewing. Over 18 months I submitted over 80 applications, and got interviews at 40-50 different companies. Total phone and video interviews ended up being over 110 before I basically gave up. I was trying to transition from a full stack dev mostly with perl backends into a full stack django dev. But I don't think the fact that most of my experience being in perl was the issue, as in some cases my past experience was not talked about much or not mentioned at all. Plus I've re-written my resume and linkedin to mostly only mentioned python and django projects that I've worked on.

The interviews were all the same mostly. Do a take home project or do leetcode problems while the interviewer stares at you. Sometimes I did bad, sometimes I did alright, and other times I did great. It didn't seem to matter. The funny thing is as I got more desperate, I started applying to crappier companies and more junior positions for lower pay. As I went down the ladder, the interviews got even more complicated and challenging!

A couple of years ago I got interested in HVAC technology after having my HVAC unit replaced and researching options. As I'd mostly depleted my savings, I started debating on jumping ship to be an HVAC tech. I could cram for an EPA certification test over a couple of weeks and get a refrigeration cert and then be nearly guaranteed a position at a couple of local HVAC shops for $15 an hour. The only reason I haven't done that (yet) is like you said because of my kids. My life story would be I went to tech school out of high school and was an avionics tech for 3 years, followed by 5 years to get through university, followed by 10 years of software developer experience and then 2 years of no work followed by becoming an HVAC tech working with high school drop outs as co-workers. There would be no telling my kids to get an education when this (forced) path I'm on shows how worthless it is. I've never felt so lost and useless in my entire life.

The other reason for not jumping ship (yet) is that I feel so qualified on django/python stacks. You could drop me into any dumpster fire of a django project and I'd be fine. It is extremely insane that the only people getting hired in that space are people with under 2 years of experience or people with over 10 years of django only experience. There is absolutely no middle ground (which is where I fall in).

I'm now debating jumping on a difference language with a smaller community (similar to how perl used to be) like golang or elixir. But there is no guarantee there but I feel like hiring in that space would more likely respect past experience or at least know that if you graduated college and have years of experience that you would be able to "mostly learn anything" and be reliable. Dunno...

For me that is definitly not normal, that is something I will subject myself only if out of options and desperaly need a new job.

What does optimal stopping in particular the rule of 37% tell us about the waste generated via a 7x interview process?

When they were crying about developer shortage for so long that they switched from regular tears to crocodile tears...

College is slowly become a worse conscientiousness/agreeableness filter since it is now the default.

Ridiculous. That’s what a panel interview is meant for.

I would refuse unless they want to pay for my time.

I'd tell them that every interview will cost them X/year in more salary.

Google does it. Google is successful. So if we do it, we'll be successful.

5-7 interviews became normal around the time $400k+ salaries became normal.

One of the reasons is people become less competent in gauging minds …

it became normal when people stopped saying no and instead of banding together decided this was a good thing to let them prove they are smarter than the next guy. meanwhile nobody wins.

C3 AI does this bullshit.

I'm hiring devs in 2 interviews. It isn't that hard.

> Am I just out of touch?

You're out of touch

I'm outta time

but I'm outta my head

when you're asking around

I agree that this is just dumb. We've lost our way.

Prop 13 should be repealed.

Cultural fit is a thing. Its important you can get along with everyone. Especially in a PM role.

That is insane.

whatever it takes to get that bare cash

Way overkill.

7hrs of interview for $300k+/yr seems fine.

The US President interviews for a whole year, for $400k/yr

>When did a hiring manager lose their authority and the trust of the organization to do their job?

I've noticed that recently too. Hiring managers at many companies don't even know what the salary being offered to their candidates is until after they are hired.