8 ms·

> We will do our best to provide a 15 minute break and/or lunch/coffee break during your interviews, especially if you'll be interviewing for more than 3 hours.

> We will do our best to provide a 15 minute break and/or lunch/coffee break during your interviews, especially if you'll be interviewing for more than 3 hours. That said, we are happy to accommodate additional breaks or fewer breaks, depending on your preferences, just let your recruiter or recruiting coordinator know! I have seen this w/o breaks 5-7 interviews a day, too often. Some candidates suffer from low energy at the (n-1)th interview. The interviewer is baffled and gives a slightly negative feedback. The reason for the interviewee's interaction is not the skill of the interviewer. So, in short - please keep breaks. You should have a 1h (min.) dedicated lunch break if you have a long 1-day interview. In additional, you should schedule 15m breaks in the morning and afternoon session to let the candidate recuperate. Finally, please ask your interviewers to look through the candidate schedule. Take into account that they have had many interviews, do your bit to make them comfortable. Also, please do not spin this as "If you can't go without breaks in a 7h day, you are not good enough to work here". Kindness, empathy helps and makes you a better employer.

barbegal 6y ago
Is there any evidence to suggest that more than 3 hours of interviews is actually beneficial? 7 hours of interview seems like overkill. I've never had more than a couple of hours of interview: an hour with the department head and another hour with my future line manager and/or another senior employee.
- austhrow743 6y ago
  I can fake who I am for 3 hours. I'm not sure I could do 7.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ThePadawan 6y ago
    Your phrasing is such that I can't tell which side you are arguing for. I love it!
- brailsafe 6y ago
  Afaik, research suggests that interviewers know after 20 seconds whether they'll hire someone. I don't have references and don't know if this would translate well to tech interviewing, but I'd wager that the vast majority of a 7h interview day is totally pointless.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I wonder how much of that is like-me bias with the risk that 3 short interviews might get us (even) more homogenous employee populations?
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      > I wonder how much of that is like-me bias I am just crawling out of 4 months of hell of interviews and homeworks. And I can tell you: probably 90% of it. :(
    - bradlys 6y ago
      I rarely have encountered an employer that is truly - actively - trying to avoid like-me bias. If they were even remotely successful, your interviews wouldn't almost always be constructed of 3 races... and various teams at orgs wouldn't have such wildly lopsided demographics.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        Wouldn’t entire elimination of irrelevant bias mean that teams would have wildly varying demographics? If I have 16 teams of 4 people each, I should probably expect to find an all female team and an all male team, if we assume that gender has no bearing on individual performance or on team selection and that gender bias was entirely removed, leaving the gender of each team member to a coin flip? Similarly, I’d expect to find a fair number of teams who all had O+ blood type today, as I think we do not discriminate on that basis.
        bradlys 6y ago
        Team size is going to be important to note. The teams I'm talking about are frequently near 10 or more members. As your point becomes more important as the size gets smaller. If it were all teams of 1 then each time would have incredible bias...
- kamaal 6y ago
  >>7 hours of interview seems like overkill. 7? There are companies that do this plus a bar raiser round. Some times two bar raiser rounds. 9 rounds is quite common in FAANGs. There is also this condition that even single negative feed back after 9 hours of interviews. Like a 10 minute bad session in a 9 hour game disqualifies you. Like 8:50 of blazingly awesome performance is considered a waste even if the feed back was slightly negative in a 10 minute section. This is basically a circus performance.
  - vkou 6y ago
    FAANG will usually happily hire you if you had one bad on-site interview, but the rest were good.
  - greggyb 6y ago
    Recently had a couple of interviews with members of FAANG. First was a quick call with a recruiter to make sure the role was a good fit. Then a prep call where I was told exactly what my interviews would be, then a 3 hour session with 10 minute breaks between each of three interviews. The second was a similar quick call with a recruiter, then a 1 hour phone call technical screen. Then a prep call and ample prep material shared by the recruiter. Then a 5 hour session of 45 minute interviews with 15 minute breaks each hour. These were both for technical roles, but not 100% engineering roles. Both processes were fully remote. I was struck by how well prepared I was, and how few surprises there were. I had a chance to discuss the interview process with both companies, and they talked about changes in the process to support remote interviewing. The first indicated that there was no difference other than being remote. The second indicated that their typical interviews were full hours, rather than 45 minutes, but otherwise the number of interviews was the same.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>"If you can't go without breaks in a 7h day, you are not good enough to work here" even worse when you think it's really saying "if you can't go without breaks in a 7h day of meetings"
- csunbird 6y ago
  It is even worse when it is legally required for employer to allow for an hour break after every 4 working hours. Edit: It is at least where I live. (EU)
  - wilsonrocks 6y ago
    In the UK at least, it's not this generous, even with the legislation from the EU working time directive. What country are you in?
    - csunbird 6y ago
      I live in Germany and it seems like I am incorrect (I looked it up), it is actually 30 minutes, for 9 hours of work. But my contract states it is 1 hour per day, which I assumed was the law. Sorry about the confusion!
      - wilsonrocks 6y ago
        NP, and good on you for having such a good contract!
  - coredog64 6y ago
    Typical US state laws are 15 minute paid break for every 4 hours and an unpaid 30 minute meal break for every 8 hours. The assumption is that these breaks must be scheduled for hourly workers but that “white collar, non-overtime” workers have enough flexibility to self schedule.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > in a 7h day of meetings While still being expected to produce 10+ hours/day worth of software development.
twic 6y ago
When Amazon interviewed me, it was something like 10:00 - 17:00 with no breaks. They didn't tell me that in advance, so i hadn't had a big breakfast. I actually don't think they did this on purpose. When i mentioned to someone at the end of the day that there was no lunch break, they were surprised. I think it's just that they're such a constitutionally incompetent organisation that things like this will just happen from time to time.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Amazon just showed you it doesn't care about its people in the least. That is accurate based on the 10 people I've known that have worked there.
  - GreenWatermelon 6y ago
    it's also accurate based on all the news I see online...
bleah1000 6y ago
I think the problem is that even with breaks, you can still be mentally exhausted by the last interview or two. For a normal work day, I wouldn't expect people to switch between writing completely different algorithms and problems so often. In a day of interviews, switching to a new problem five or six times can be exhausting. Make sure your interview process isn't stacking too many in a row, or the signal from the last few is going to be pretty bad.

barbegal 6y ago

Is there any evidence to suggest that more than 3 hours of interviews is actually beneficial? 7 hours of interview seems like overkill. I've never had more than a couple of hours of interview: an hour with the department head and another hour with my future line manager and/or another senior employee.

austhrow743 6y ago
I can fake who I am for 3 hours. I'm not sure I could do 7.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ThePadawan 6y ago
  Your phrasing is such that I can't tell which side you are arguing for. I love it!
brailsafe 6y ago
Afaik, research suggests that interviewers know after 20 seconds whether they'll hire someone. I don't have references and don't know if this would translate well to tech interviewing, but I'd wager that the vast majority of a 7h interview day is totally pointless.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I wonder how much of that is like-me bias with the risk that 3 short interviews might get us (even) more homogenous employee populations?
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    > I wonder how much of that is like-me bias I am just crawling out of 4 months of hell of interviews and homeworks. And I can tell you: probably 90% of it. :(
  - bradlys 6y ago
    I rarely have encountered an employer that is truly - actively - trying to avoid like-me bias. If they were even remotely successful, your interviews wouldn't almost always be constructed of 3 races... and various teams at orgs wouldn't have such wildly lopsided demographics.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Wouldn’t entire elimination of irrelevant bias mean that teams would have wildly varying demographics? If I have 16 teams of 4 people each, I should probably expect to find an all female team and an all male team, if we assume that gender has no bearing on individual performance or on team selection and that gender bias was entirely removed, leaving the gender of each team member to a coin flip? Similarly, I’d expect to find a fair number of teams who all had O+ blood type today, as I think we do not discriminate on that basis.
      - bradlys 6y ago
        Team size is going to be important to note. The teams I'm talking about are frequently near 10 or more members. As your point becomes more important as the size gets smaller. If it were all teams of 1 then each time would have incredible bias...
kamaal 6y ago
>>7 hours of interview seems like overkill. 7? There are companies that do this plus a bar raiser round. Some times two bar raiser rounds. 9 rounds is quite common in FAANGs. There is also this condition that even single negative feed back after 9 hours of interviews. Like a 10 minute bad session in a 9 hour game disqualifies you. Like 8:50 of blazingly awesome performance is considered a waste even if the feed back was slightly negative in a 10 minute section. This is basically a circus performance.
- vkou 6y ago
  FAANG will usually happily hire you if you had one bad on-site interview, but the rest were good.
- greggyb 6y ago
  Recently had a couple of interviews with members of FAANG. First was a quick call with a recruiter to make sure the role was a good fit. Then a prep call where I was told exactly what my interviews would be, then a 3 hour session with 10 minute breaks between each of three interviews. The second was a similar quick call with a recruiter, then a 1 hour phone call technical screen. Then a prep call and ample prep material shared by the recruiter. Then a 5 hour session of 45 minute interviews with 15 minute breaks each hour. These were both for technical roles, but not 100% engineering roles. Both processes were fully remote. I was struck by how well prepared I was, and how few surprises there were. I had a chance to discuss the interview process with both companies, and they talked about changes in the process to support remote interviewing. The first indicated that there was no difference other than being remote. The second indicated that their typical interviews were full hours, rather than 45 minutes, but otherwise the number of interviews was the same.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>"If you can't go without breaks in a 7h day, you are not good enough to work here" even worse when you think it's really saying "if you can't go without breaks in a 7h day of meetings"

csunbird 6y ago
It is even worse when it is legally required for employer to allow for an hour break after every 4 working hours. Edit: It is at least where I live. (EU)
- wilsonrocks 6y ago
  In the UK at least, it's not this generous, even with the legislation from the EU working time directive. What country are you in?
  - csunbird 6y ago
    I live in Germany and it seems like I am incorrect (I looked it up), it is actually 30 minutes, for 9 hours of work. But my contract states it is 1 hour per day, which I assumed was the law. Sorry about the confusion!
    - wilsonrocks 6y ago
      NP, and good on you for having such a good contract!
- coredog64 6y ago
  Typical US state laws are 15 minute paid break for every 4 hours and an unpaid 30 minute meal break for every 8 hours. The assumption is that these breaks must be scheduled for hourly workers but that “white collar, non-overtime” workers have enough flexibility to self schedule.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> in a 7h day of meetings While still being expected to produce 10+ hours/day worth of software development.

twic 6y ago

When Amazon interviewed me, it was something like 10:00 - 17:00 with no breaks. They didn't tell me that in advance, so i hadn't had a big breakfast. I actually don't think they did this on purpose. When i mentioned to someone at the end of the day that there was no lunch break, they were surprised. I think it's just that they're such a constitutionally incompetent organisation that things like this will just happen from time to time.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Amazon just showed you it doesn't care about its people in the least. That is accurate based on the 10 people I've known that have worked there.
- GreenWatermelon 6y ago
  it's also accurate based on all the news I see online...

bleah1000 6y ago

I think the problem is that even with breaks, you can still be mentally exhausted by the last interview or two. For a normal work day, I wouldn't expect people to switch between writing completely different algorithms and problems so often. In a day of interviews, switching to a new problem five or six times can be exhausting. Make sure your interview process isn't stacking too many in a row, or the signal from the last few is going to be pretty bad.