6 ms·

That's not crazy. Some of these are probably what 30 minutes? Tech interviews 60 mins? So what, five hours? Remember when on-site interviews meant an hour t

That's not crazy. Some of these are probably what 30 minutes? Tech interviews 60 mins? So what, five hours? Remember when on-site interviews meant an hour total commute plus say six hours of total interview plus lunch event. Some high demand companies put candidates through more than one round of that. Not to mention if you were flying from out of town... I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast and got fired from Accenture as a result. Compared to this four-six hours scheduled at your leisure seems great, even if fragmented over a few days

ChumpGPT 3y ago
I'm kind of an old guy but I remember having interviews, just shooting the shit with the hiring manager and maybe a team lead present. Whole thing would last about 30 minutes and end with a handshake and an offer in 24-48 hours or a call to let me know I wasn't chosen. Between 1999 and 2019 I worked for 5 different companies and the interview process was basically the same. These were not small companies either. If someone told me today I'd have 6 interviews with homework, I'd tell them to fuck off. Thank goodness I retired......
- ejb999 3y ago
  last time I interviewed for a job (and I am a sr developer with lengthy resume and all the 'right' skills for the job I was applying), after initial interview with recruiter and then hiring manager the recruiter said I had to take a coding test like I was some entry level programmer - I said no way, and thanks for your time - they made me an offer a few days later anyway. Sometimes you just need to push back - won't always work - but at least you can have some control over the process.
yardstick 3y ago
Hope they got the Google job then??
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  He did not.
Clubber 3y ago
I remember when on-site interviews were an hour and that was it. All this stuff companies do now is insane. If a person isn't performant, you'll know within 30 days, but you'll never know by interviewing them. I haven't had to cold interview in 20+ years. I hope I never have to based on how it works now. I get all my jobs from previous colleagues. Companies are closing the door to a lot of great talent based on this silliness, but they'll never learn.
- Klonoar 3y ago
  I hate the modern interview loop as much as the next person, but from a business perspective why would you want to risk 30 days of nothing vs a few extra hours to verify? We should fix the modern interview loop (very hard) but the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.
  - Clubber 3y ago
    That is making the assumption that any time spent over the traditional 1 hour helps you confirm whether the candidate is performant or not. I dispute that assumption and figure any time outside of that initial hour makes a hiring mistake that much more expensive. Calculate it this way. I can spend 3x 1 hour (3 people interviewing a candidate for 1 hour) and have a 60% chance of hiring a performant person. I could also spend 3x 6 hours and have about the same chance. When that 40% non-performant candidate shows up and I have to repeat the hiring cycle, It's significantly less expensive in both labor costs and opportunity costs for the 3x1 interview style than the 3x6 interview style. This doesn't take into account all the talent that has no need or interest to go through a 3x6 interview process (I am one of them). >the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there. Ya like I said, the industry just kinda does what it does, complains about not being able to find talent, and will never learn.
    - Klonoar 3y ago
      > I dispute that assumption and figure any time outside of that initial hour makes a hiring mistake that much more expensive. Okay, sure - dispute it if you want. It doesn't change the fact that the industry seemingly collectively decided that 1 hour isn't a sufficient amount of time to gauge fit/effectiveness/etc. My point to you is that given the above, you have to make a choice. Spending the extra few hours gives you some hopeful assurance of what you're getting. I once again will note it's not a good system, but there is to date seemingly no widely agreed upon good system.
eikenberry 3y ago
5-6 hours is about right on the low end, but on the high end you double the hours interviewing and add up to 30-40 hours of work for the take homework. It varies a lot. The average seem to be around the 12-20 hours with homework or 5-10 without. Personally I still prefer the version with a take home project, even if longer, as I don't like performative programming.
arter4 3y ago
It is crazy because it dilutes the interview experience and you never know when it's going to end and when they're going to decide (and actually tell you). And why should you talk to all those people? Talk to the tech folks, then to the CTO, then the founder, then what, the VC investors, the whole board? Can the CTO not describe the company vision and how IT fits in that picture? It does smell of a lack of vision or an inability to delegate.
- nradov 3y ago
  It's largely a way to dilute responsibility and spread blame. If a new hire turns out to be a failure then it's tough to point the finger at any one interviewer since they were all fooled. This type of diffused decision making process is typically instituted by the careerists at large organizations where being held accountable for any major failure will derail your chances of promotion.
LeafItAlone 3y ago
> I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast This is literally unbelievable. I cannot remember a time when the east coast was inaccessible for three weeks…
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  It probably wouldn’t have saved his job to reach any random spot on the east coast, so you don’t have to think of a time when it was all inaccessible.
  - LeafItAlone 3y ago
    Do you think that the parent I was responding to didn’t understand my intent? Did you really think I meant any random location on the east coast?
    - lazyasciiart 3y ago
      Yes, because otherwise it doesn’t seem like an outlandish enough scenario to justify literally saying you don’t believe him. Hurricane Sandy was the first thing that sprang to my mind, but there have been plenty of major travel disruptions over the years, and I wouldn’t expect to hear every time some smaller city was unreachable from California.
      - LeafItAlone 3y ago
        Given their response above, they figured out my intention even without being super pedantic.
- moron4hire 3y ago
  There was a year (maybe 2012? I was in Philadelphia at the time) where we had back to back snow storms of more than 12" accumulation, about a week and a half apart. It came at a bad time of poor investment in snow clearing equipment and services, so many places had done no cleanup of the first storm before the second one hit. I don't know how the airports faired, but the roads were a deathtrap for weeks.
itsautomatisch 3y ago
Most interview loops aren't just 4-6 hours, though. A lot of times the virtual on-sites are 5+ hours alone, and then you still usually have 2-4 stages of scattered interviews before you even get there. It's also not an efficient way to figure out if both sides are a "good fit" because you're basically doing a whirlwind tour of video chats with people you most likely won't work with. Even worse, the entire interview process itself can take over a month or two depending on the company, making it hard to stay engaged the entire period, especially if you're interviewing for more than one place (which I assume most job-seekers are).
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast and got fired from Accenture as a result. It takes less than one week to travel across the country by road. There's a whole system of Greyhound buses that serve exactly this purpose. How is it possible to get stuck for three weeks? https://www.greyhound.com/bus-routes/san-francisco-ca-new-york-ny https://www.greyhound.com/bus-routes/san-francisco-ca-new-yo... notes that it takes 76 hours and costs $300.
- eloisant 3y ago
  You probably don't know it's going take more than a week right away. You hope you can fly the next day, then the next, etc...
  - Klonoar 3y ago
    As someone who had this happen to them but in London: yeah, this is how it goes. Once flights resume it’s a thundering herd problem of annoying proportions too.
khokhol 3y ago
So what, five hours? Add in the 6-hour take home (which companies delusionally believe will take 2 hours, despite being often inadequately scoped or otherwise poorly presented; while quite often expecting a nitpick-proof solution); and all the random delays, and other hoops - and the none-too-occasional ghosting (even at the very end of the process) - Yup, it adds up.
- sensanaty 3y ago
  > which companies delusionally believe will take 2 hours, despite being often inadequately scoped or otherwise poorly presented; while quite often expecting a nitpick-proof solution I have to go on a rant about this one cause it happened to me recently. I applied for a Sr. Frontend position, and they have me do a takehome where I recreate some small component with some time-travelling functionality. It was actually quite fun to do and I enjoyed building it, but the feedback afterwards was maddening. One of the points of feedback they gave me was that what I implemented wasn't 1:1 aligned with the design they gave me... The design they gave me was a blurry JPG with compression artifacts that was maybe 300x300 embedded into a random Notion document they sent me with an extremely vague list of requirements. I even explicitly asked them if they could give me a higher quality version of it so I could match it more closely, but they said that was the only document they could give me. When I tried to somewhat align the picture to the actual design I was implementing, the border-radii of the elements was so blurry from the compression that it was literally impossible to know whether I got it exactly right or not. They also gave me no notes on specific fonts used (the one on their marketing site was a licensed font that cost money), specific brand colors (I had to go to their marketing website and hope the green I saw on the buttons there was the one they were expecting) or anything else of the sort. It was obvious they expected me to spend at least 6 hours on it considering the feedback, but they explicitly said 2 hours and didn't give nearly enough reference for me to go off of to know what they truly expected from me. Absolutely ridiculous process

ChumpGPT 3y ago

I'm kind of an old guy but I remember having interviews, just shooting the shit with the hiring manager and maybe a team lead present. Whole thing would last about 30 minutes and end with a handshake and an offer in 24-48 hours or a call to let me know I wasn't chosen. Between 1999 and 2019 I worked for 5 different companies and the interview process was basically the same. These were not small companies either. If someone told me today I'd have 6 interviews with homework, I'd tell them to fuck off. Thank goodness I retired......

ejb999 3y ago
last time I interviewed for a job (and I am a sr developer with lengthy resume and all the 'right' skills for the job I was applying), after initial interview with recruiter and then hiring manager the recruiter said I had to take a coding test like I was some entry level programmer - I said no way, and thanks for your time - they made me an offer a few days later anyway. Sometimes you just need to push back - won't always work - but at least you can have some control over the process.

yardstick 3y ago

Hope they got the Google job then??

throwawaymaths 3y ago
He did not.

Clubber 3y ago

I remember when on-site interviews were an hour and that was it. All this stuff companies do now is insane. If a person isn't performant, you'll know within 30 days, but you'll never know by interviewing them. I haven't had to cold interview in 20+ years. I hope I never have to based on how it works now. I get all my jobs from previous colleagues. Companies are closing the door to a lot of great talent based on this silliness, but they'll never learn.

Klonoar 3y ago
I hate the modern interview loop as much as the next person, but from a business perspective why would you want to risk 30 days of nothing vs a few extra hours to verify? We should fix the modern interview loop (very hard) but the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.
- Clubber 3y ago
  That is making the assumption that any time spent over the traditional 1 hour helps you confirm whether the candidate is performant or not. I dispute that assumption and figure any time outside of that initial hour makes a hiring mistake that much more expensive. Calculate it this way. I can spend 3x 1 hour (3 people interviewing a candidate for 1 hour) and have a 60% chance of hiring a performant person. I could also spend 3x 6 hours and have about the same chance. When that 40% non-performant candidate shows up and I have to repeat the hiring cycle, It's significantly less expensive in both labor costs and opportunity costs for the 3x1 interview style than the 3x6 interview style. This doesn't take into account all the talent that has no need or interest to go through a 3x6 interview process (I am one of them). >the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there. Ya like I said, the industry just kinda does what it does, complains about not being able to find talent, and will never learn.
  - Klonoar 3y ago
    > I dispute that assumption and figure any time outside of that initial hour makes a hiring mistake that much more expensive. Okay, sure - dispute it if you want. It doesn't change the fact that the industry seemingly collectively decided that 1 hour isn't a sufficient amount of time to gauge fit/effectiveness/etc. My point to you is that given the above, you have to make a choice. Spending the extra few hours gives you some hopeful assurance of what you're getting. I once again will note it's not a good system, but there is to date seemingly no widely agreed upon good system.

eikenberry 3y ago

5-6 hours is about right on the low end, but on the high end you double the hours interviewing and add up to 30-40 hours of work for the take homework. It varies a lot. The average seem to be around the 12-20 hours with homework or 5-10 without. Personally I still prefer the version with a take home project, even if longer, as I don't like performative programming.

arter4 3y ago

It is crazy because it dilutes the interview experience and you never know when it's going to end and when they're going to decide (and actually tell you). And why should you talk to all those people? Talk to the tech folks, then to the CTO, then the founder, then what, the VC investors, the whole board? Can the CTO not describe the company vision and how IT fits in that picture? It does smell of a lack of vision or an inability to delegate.

nradov 3y ago
It's largely a way to dilute responsibility and spread blame. If a new hire turns out to be a failure then it's tough to point the finger at any one interviewer since they were all fooled. This type of diffused decision making process is typically instituted by the careerists at large organizations where being held accountable for any major failure will derail your chances of promotion.

LeafItAlone 3y ago

> I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast This is literally unbelievable. I cannot remember a time when the east coast was inaccessible for three weeks…

lazyasciiart 3y ago
It probably wouldn’t have saved his job to reach any random spot on the east coast, so you don’t have to think of a time when it was all inaccessible.
- LeafItAlone 3y ago
  Do you think that the parent I was responding to didn’t understand my intent? Did you really think I meant any random location on the east coast?
  - lazyasciiart 3y ago
    Yes, because otherwise it doesn’t seem like an outlandish enough scenario to justify literally saying you don’t believe him. Hurricane Sandy was the first thing that sprang to my mind, but there have been plenty of major travel disruptions over the years, and I wouldn’t expect to hear every time some smaller city was unreachable from California.
    - LeafItAlone 3y ago
      Given their response above, they figured out my intention even without being super pedantic.
moron4hire 3y ago
There was a year (maybe 2012? I was in Philadelphia at the time) where we had back to back snow storms of more than 12" accumulation, about a week and a half apart. It came at a bad time of poor investment in snow clearing equipment and services, so many places had done no cleanup of the first storm before the second one hit. I don't know how the airports faired, but the roads were a deathtrap for weeks.

itsautomatisch 3y ago

Most interview loops aren't just 4-6 hours, though. A lot of times the virtual on-sites are 5+ hours alone, and then you still usually have 2-4 stages of scattered interviews before you even get there. It's also not an efficient way to figure out if both sides are a "good fit" because you're basically doing a whirlwind tour of video chats with people you most likely won't work with. Even worse, the entire interview process itself can take over a month or two depending on the company, making it hard to stay engaged the entire period, especially if you're interviewing for more than one place (which I assume most job-seekers are).

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast and got fired from Accenture as a result. It takes less than one week to travel across the country by road. There's a whole system of Greyhound buses that serve exactly this purpose. How is it possible to get stuck for three weeks? https://www.greyhound.com/bus-routes/san-francisco-ca-new-york-ny https://www.greyhound.com/bus-routes/san-francisco-ca-new-yo... notes that it takes 76 hours and costs $300.

eloisant 3y ago
You probably don't know it's going take more than a week right away. You hope you can fly the next day, then the next, etc...
- Klonoar 3y ago
  As someone who had this happen to them but in London: yeah, this is how it goes. Once flights resume it’s a thundering herd problem of annoying proportions too.

khokhol 3y ago

So what, five hours? Add in the 6-hour take home (which companies delusionally believe will take 2 hours, despite being often inadequately scoped or otherwise poorly presented; while quite often expecting a nitpick-proof solution); and all the random delays, and other hoops - and the none-too-occasional ghosting (even at the very end of the process) - Yup, it adds up.

sensanaty 3y ago
> which companies delusionally believe will take 2 hours, despite being often inadequately scoped or otherwise poorly presented; while quite often expecting a nitpick-proof solution I have to go on a rant about this one cause it happened to me recently. I applied for a Sr. Frontend position, and they have me do a takehome where I recreate some small component with some time-travelling functionality. It was actually quite fun to do and I enjoyed building it, but the feedback afterwards was maddening. One of the points of feedback they gave me was that what I implemented wasn't 1:1 aligned with the design they gave me... The design they gave me was a blurry JPG with compression artifacts that was maybe 300x300 embedded into a random Notion document they sent me with an extremely vague list of requirements. I even explicitly asked them if they could give me a higher quality version of it so I could match it more closely, but they said that was the only document they could give me. When I tried to somewhat align the picture to the actual design I was implementing, the border-radii of the elements was so blurry from the compression that it was literally impossible to know whether I got it exactly right or not. They also gave me no notes on specific fonts used (the one on their marketing site was a licensed font that cost money), specific brand colors (I had to go to their marketing website and hope the green I saw on the buttons there was the one they were expecting) or anything else of the sort. It was obvious they expected me to spend at least 6 hours on it considering the feedback, but they explicitly said 2 hours and didn't give nearly enough reference for me to go off of to know what they truly expected from me. Absolutely ridiculous process