8 ms·

> 4-5 hours is pretty excessive for an interview process actually. That's preposterous. You're going to spend hundreds of hours working together. 4-5 hours is

> 4-5 hours is pretty excessive for an interview process actually. That's preposterous. You're going to spend hundreds of hours working together. 4-5 hours is extremely reasonable to make sure it's a good mutual fit. Of course, it shouldn't be 4-5 hours for all candidates. The last hour spent should have a pretty high conversion rate to offer. But 4-5 hours for hired candidates is completely standard. > A candidate cannot be doing 4-5 hours for an interview process just to hear a no at the end. Successful job hunts need to have many irons in the fire at once and if each one is taking 4-5 hours there's only so much you can realistically take on This is a toxic attitude. If you "spray and pray" then refuse any actual interview processes then you're never going to get a great job. Every job I've gotten came from identifying a dozen or so opportunities up front and going deep on them.

tomrod 2y ago
What is the marginal value of the fourth or fifth deep hour that you wouldn't grok by hour 3.5?
- michaelt 2y ago
  30 mins chat with a recruiter who'll try to suss out whether they can afford you, make sure you're actually interested, and check you've got the right to work in the country. 1 hour hiring manager interview the first person who actually understands those acronyms on your CV 1.5 hour technical/coding interview, to check you know how to program 1 hour behavioural interview to check if you've ever gotten into a fistfight about database schema design 1 hour chat with your boss's boss's boss, who feels he ought to have a conversation with someone before approving a six-figure paycheck. This lengthy and bureaucratic process is vital to ensuring prospective hires have the patience needed to get through all the other lengthy and bureaucratic processes their job will entail.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    I appreciate your comment as its intended defense and understand why a committee approach is a CYA risk-assessment measure (which ultimately turns job placement into a popularity contest as technical ability and team desiredata take a back seat/lower weight to fisticuffs assessments by HR). However, parent commentator mentioned wanting to _go deep_, and needed 4-5 hours to do it, indicating that the typical committee pattern is out of alignment with what they were advocating. Further, your time assessments are too long. You can assess fisticuffs in 10 minutes along with a background check. Technical doesn't have to be 1.5 hours. Also, 90 day probation policies exist to address as well.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  I wondered that myself, when I had my 12th interview for a position in Nvidia's DevTech team. (Didn't get an offer, in case you're curious:)
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    N.B.: Despite the peculiar number of interviews, I was left with a lot of respect for the team members and their work. If anyone sees an interesting posting for that team, I'd definitely suggest applying. And their 2 take-home coding projects reminded me why I love performance optimization.
  - yodelshady 2y ago
    Jeez. Should they not expect each interview stage to at least whittle down 1 applicant for every 2 that reach that stage? That's 4096 people who got to interview. Or I guess they decided on a "mixture of experts" and put everyone through to multiple "final round" from different domain experts? All of whom are somehow adding value? I don't think I've ever said this before, but that sounds like a job for a management consultancy.
    - CoastalCoder 2y ago
      IIRC, they were scheduled in something like 3 total batches.
  - sgerenser 2y ago
    Wow, and I thought the 8 interviews (each around 45 minutes iirc) I did for Apple was excessive.
- ramchip 2y ago
  You can get them to meet a more sizeable chunk of the team which helps keep individual bias down and ensures people are fine with the new hire.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    I mentioned this in another reply -- while this is true and common, it's not what the grandparent commentator mentioned. They wanted 4-5 hours to "go deep" which is really unreal from an interviewing perspective. It's a date, not an interrogation!
csa 2y ago
> 4-5 hours is extremely reasonable to make sure it's a good mutual fit. If it takes 4-5 hours to ensure a good fit, then that says more about you and/or the company than it does about the applicant. Let me be charitable and say that some large orgs do the 4-5 hours to benefit the company via CYA and letting everyone get their chance to do interviews, but that’s just sloppy org-side waste. As another commenter said, what actionable info do you gain in hours 4 and 5 than you already have at 3.5. I would to further and say what do you gain in hours 2 and 3 that you don’t already have at 1.5, and why are you so horribly inefficient in the event that you come up with a non-BS answer? So much of the hiring process is corporate theater rather than optimal selection processes. I think most of the participants would do well to realize that.
michaelt 2y ago
It sure would be nice to live in a world where programming qualifications meant something, so I didn't have to spend 2.5 of those 5 hours demonstrating that I can do the programming equivalent of tying my shoe laces.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I sure wish it was just tying my shoe. More like "can you tie in a windsor knot?" Then later they say "sorry we wanted someone who can do a Gordian knot".
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    Oh, that’s a great analogy. Everyone can tie a windsor knot, but nearly the same amount of people will have forgotten how to do it every time they actually need to.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- thwarted 2y ago
  Yes, it would be nice to live in a world where fizzbuzz wasn't necessary to filter for evidence of claimed qualifications (although, if fizzbuzz is taking half of a multi-hour experience, it's not being used correctly). My point being, "programming qualifications" are just words anyone can put on a page.
  - gedy 2y ago
    Honestly I think the real issue is non-technical recruiting/hr have gotten way too involved in filtering and selecting candidates, so dipshits or liars end up getting interviewed at all. When technical eng management are actively involved in looking at a candidate, I rarely see these terrible ones show up and waste time.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    There's already a way to validate claimed qualifications - ask to see their certificate and (if you're being particularly diligent) contact the school to verify it. Nobody in the tech industry does this though. Maybe it's possible to graduate from college with a CS degree without being able to solve fizzbuzz? So you need to check they can program despite their qualifications? IDK though.
FireBeyond 2y ago
> Of course, it shouldn't be 4-5 hours for all candidates. The last hour spent should have a pretty high conversion rate to offer. I have been in multiple 'late round' interview stages where I learned I was one of 3 candidates (reasonable) through one of 8 candidates. (Come on. I'm involved in hiring too. If you're not whittling down harder than that, you're making a mess. The university that my partner works at hired a new President with 4 candidates at the final round.)
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>You're going to spend hundreds of hours working together. 4-5 hours is extremely reasonable to make sure it's a good mutual fit. GP specified that these were for entry level candidate. How many people need to give a thumbs up to 'culture fit' (culture fit implies that 1-2 people's opinions should mesh with the rest of the culture, no)? I sure hope you aren't just grilling a college student with 4 hours of quizzes. > If you "spray and pray" then refuse any actual interview processes then you're never going to get a great job. most people out of college don't get (nor in my opinion, need) "great jobs". At least not by what the internet considers a "great job". They should get plenty of training/growth, a liveable salary, and be willing to ask a lot of questions. Interview processes don't seem to promote 2/3 of these, and some industries 3/3. >Every job I've gotten came from identifying a dozen or so opportunities up front and going deep on them. It was a mix. Sometimes spraying worked, sometimes I just got a referral or even blindly approached. I definitely do not recommend going deep for a first job unless that is your dream job and you're staying connected for years with a contact. Even then, layoffs happen, or you simply are passed up. You always need fallbacks and IMO it's not that healthy to put so much emotional investment into one conglomerate like that that will only see you as a number. Take pride in accomplishments, not brands.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > I sure hope you aren't just grilling a college student with 4 hours of quizzes. You misunderstood. 4-5 hours was for the entire interview across all steps, not a single 4-5 quiz session. At minimum, you need to have some time for the candidate to ask about the company and learn about the team, too. Suggesting everything gets crammed into a single 1 hour conversation where both parties make a huge decision is not going to work for most. Most candidates won’t even like that these days. They want to talk to the company, not get quizzed for 60 minutes and then asked to quit their current job and join this new company
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    I think we are still a bit misaligned. I'll explain my process for my last role as an example. Maybe one too many interviews for my taste, but it was for a senior role, so I'd say it's fine: - 1 recruiter call to align (I personally don't count this, but some do) - 1 call with the technical director focused on language and tool specific questions - 1 call with 3 different team leads (since I was being considered for multiple roles). These were mostly soft questions with some light prodding of concepts. - 1 call with 2 producers for some more soft questions and culture fit - 1 more call with the overall director (basicslly 1 level below founder/c class) for, well, more soft questions and culture fit. - lastly, an offer call with HR (I don't count this, but some do) So I consider it 4 stages, some consider it 6. The times for all of them were around or a little over an hour so there's no issue IMO with call length. Usually 30 minutes of questions, 10 minutes of intro, and then 15 minutes of my own questions. The number of stages felt a tiny bit too obsessive (did I really have to meet a director 3 levels above the chain? I don't think so), but not worth complaining about for a senior role. But still, these were separated 1-1.5 weeks apart, so this process ended up taking 7 weeks from recruiter call to offer letter. That's just so much dead air and it feels like this could have been condensed or abridged somehow. For a new grad this just seems to be madness. Not just the time span but the number of people involved for a single hire at a moderately large company. (And I have gone through that many stages just to get rejected in my junior days). There's not as much to ask a new grad (again, unless you just want to quizz them for hours), not as many people will interface with them on day to day tasks, they will likely negotiate less than a senior unless it's some top student will multiple pending offers. >Most candidates won’t even like that these days. They want to talk to the company, not get quizzed for 60 minutes and then asked to quit their current job and join this new company That'd be preferable for me. But Im not a new grad. I did my time doing 20 hour take homes and grinding Leet code. I was sure hoping there'd be less of that as I have 8 YOE and more direct experience to speak about on my behalf, but it seems that even 10+ years can't escape Leetcode hell. But I digress. Most of the conversation revolved around new grad stuff after all. I understand the need to make sure people with no experience (and an industry with no licensing) have the technical know how. I'd just wish project times were more realistic.
Aeolun 2y ago
> That's preposterous. You're going to spend hundreds of hours working together. 4-5 hours is extremely reasonable to make sure it's a good mutual fit. The point is that you know whether it’s a good fit after 1 hour, so anything after that is just posturing.
- themanmaran 2y ago
  Not always so. Generally during the first call with a candidate I can filter out the people who clearly aren't going to be a good fit. But I've had people I was really excited to hire totally fail on the technical interview. And in some cases, turn belligerent when pushed on their solutions. There are plenty of engineers who are friendly and really good at talking tech, but missing some underlying qualifications.
Teever 2y ago
Here's a solution. Candidates should be paid for their time in the interview process.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  Tried that. Word got out that people could get paid for interviews. Got a lot of people using us for paid interview practice with no intention of joining. Stopped doing that.
  - Teever 2y ago
    What would happen if it was mandated by law that all prospective employers do this?
    - valicord 2y ago
      So one could just go to a different interview every day and get paid for not working?
      - Teever 2y ago
        It sounds like interviewers would have to change their interview process to account for this. Can you think of some ways that they could innovate the interview process if spurred on my this new constraint?
        valicord 2y ago
        Most likely find some loophole that lets them keep more or less the same process but doesn't quite reach the legal criteria that require it to be paid.
        Teever 2y ago
        I bet you could think of a few ways to craft the law to eliminate or mitigate this. Let's hear them.
Draiken 2y ago
And who pays the candidates for the hours wasted in these interviews again? Comparing that to the hundreds of hours working together is what is preposterous. If interviews were paid for, then the entire conversation would shift dramatically. Let's remember that 4-5 hours is on the low end for most places IME. I've had places that had a single day with 5 hours of interviews. I had to take a day off from work to make a single interview. Can't we all agree that's absurd? This is extremely unfair on every candidate since they're doing this for multiple companies, all for free, only to then get rejected multiple times for absolutely stupid reasons. The entire system is broken.
- lazide 2y ago
  4-5 hrs is historically typical.
  - Draiken 2y ago
    Having to interview at hundreds of places to find a job is not.
    - lazide 2y ago
      That part? Correct. But I take it you didn’t live through ‘01/dot-com-crash? It was the same, but smaller scale back then. I remember looking for a job and folks were requiring a CS PhD for literal ‘help run a school computer lab’ jobs. Home Depot wouldn’t even consider your resume if you had been in Tech either. One person I talked to (not HD) said that they considered techies ‘overly entitled brats’ and didn’t want to have anything to do with them. This was in the PNW. Previously it was super high pay, no formal education required - as long as you could code. This was before AI or automated applications or the like, so I was doing 15 something manual applications a week. I ended up moving something like 8 states away to take a middle of nowhere software dev job - after applying for over a year - at 1/4 the salary that I had been previously paid. It worked out. Frankly, employers are being pretty mellow considering the market conditions. So far anyway. The biggest issue right now IMO is general confusion and overwhelm + widespread fraud and lying (in both sides of the market) resulting in the market nearly locking up. Which is putting a lot of people in very awkward positions. But things aren’t desperate enough yet to cut through the BS. No one is sure what they really want to do, what is reasonable, or what will work to produce an outcome they want, and that is causing everything to be a giant tarpit. This is what people mean when they say ‘life isn’t fair’. Well, a very mellow version of it.

tomrod 2y ago

What is the marginal value of the fourth or fifth deep hour that you wouldn't grok by hour 3.5?

michaelt 2y ago
30 mins chat with a recruiter who'll try to suss out whether they can afford you, make sure you're actually interested, and check you've got the right to work in the country. 1 hour hiring manager interview the first person who actually understands those acronyms on your CV 1.5 hour technical/coding interview, to check you know how to program 1 hour behavioural interview to check if you've ever gotten into a fistfight about database schema design 1 hour chat with your boss's boss's boss, who feels he ought to have a conversation with someone before approving a six-figure paycheck. This lengthy and bureaucratic process is vital to ensuring prospective hires have the patience needed to get through all the other lengthy and bureaucratic processes their job will entail.
- tomrod 2y ago
  I appreciate your comment as its intended defense and understand why a committee approach is a CYA risk-assessment measure (which ultimately turns job placement into a popularity contest as technical ability and team desiredata take a back seat/lower weight to fisticuffs assessments by HR). However, parent commentator mentioned wanting to _go deep_, and needed 4-5 hours to do it, indicating that the typical committee pattern is out of alignment with what they were advocating. Further, your time assessments are too long. You can assess fisticuffs in 10 minutes along with a background check. Technical doesn't have to be 1.5 hours. Also, 90 day probation policies exist to address as well.
CoastalCoder 2y ago
I wondered that myself, when I had my 12th interview for a position in Nvidia's DevTech team. (Didn't get an offer, in case you're curious:)
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  N.B.: Despite the peculiar number of interviews, I was left with a lot of respect for the team members and their work. If anyone sees an interesting posting for that team, I'd definitely suggest applying. And their 2 take-home coding projects reminded me why I love performance optimization.
- yodelshady 2y ago
  Jeez. Should they not expect each interview stage to at least whittle down 1 applicant for every 2 that reach that stage? That's 4096 people who got to interview. Or I guess they decided on a "mixture of experts" and put everyone through to multiple "final round" from different domain experts? All of whom are somehow adding value? I don't think I've ever said this before, but that sounds like a job for a management consultancy.
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    IIRC, they were scheduled in something like 3 total batches.
- sgerenser 2y ago
  Wow, and I thought the 8 interviews (each around 45 minutes iirc) I did for Apple was excessive.
ramchip 2y ago
You can get them to meet a more sizeable chunk of the team which helps keep individual bias down and ensures people are fine with the new hire.
- tomrod 2y ago
  I mentioned this in another reply -- while this is true and common, it's not what the grandparent commentator mentioned. They wanted 4-5 hours to "go deep" which is really unreal from an interviewing perspective. It's a date, not an interrogation!

csa 2y ago

> 4-5 hours is extremely reasonable to make sure it's a good mutual fit. If it takes 4-5 hours to ensure a good fit, then that says more about you and/or the company than it does about the applicant. Let me be charitable and say that some large orgs do the 4-5 hours to benefit the company via CYA and letting everyone get their chance to do interviews, but that’s just sloppy org-side waste. As another commenter said, what actionable info do you gain in hours 4 and 5 than you already have at 3.5. I would to further and say what do you gain in hours 2 and 3 that you don’t already have at 1.5, and why are you so horribly inefficient in the event that you come up with a non-BS answer? So much of the hiring process is corporate theater rather than optimal selection processes. I think most of the participants would do well to realize that.

michaelt 2y ago

It sure would be nice to live in a world where programming qualifications meant something, so I didn't have to spend 2.5 of those 5 hours demonstrating that I can do the programming equivalent of tying my shoe laces.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
I sure wish it was just tying my shoe. More like "can you tie in a windsor knot?" Then later they say "sorry we wanted someone who can do a Gordian knot".
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Oh, that’s a great analogy. Everyone can tie a windsor knot, but nearly the same amount of people will have forgotten how to do it every time they actually need to.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
thwarted 2y ago
Yes, it would be nice to live in a world where fizzbuzz wasn't necessary to filter for evidence of claimed qualifications (although, if fizzbuzz is taking half of a multi-hour experience, it's not being used correctly). My point being, "programming qualifications" are just words anyone can put on a page.
- gedy 2y ago
  Honestly I think the real issue is non-technical recruiting/hr have gotten way too involved in filtering and selecting candidates, so dipshits or liars end up getting interviewed at all. When technical eng management are actively involved in looking at a candidate, I rarely see these terrible ones show up and waste time.
- michaelt 2y ago
  There's already a way to validate claimed qualifications - ask to see their certificate and (if you're being particularly diligent) contact the school to verify it. Nobody in the tech industry does this though. Maybe it's possible to graduate from college with a CS degree without being able to solve fizzbuzz? So you need to check they can program despite their qualifications? IDK though.

FireBeyond 2y ago

> Of course, it shouldn't be 4-5 hours for all candidates. The last hour spent should have a pretty high conversion rate to offer. I have been in multiple 'late round' interview stages where I learned I was one of 3 candidates (reasonable) through one of 8 candidates. (Come on. I'm involved in hiring too. If you're not whittling down harder than that, you're making a mess. The university that my partner works at hired a new President with 4 candidates at the final round.)

johnnyanmac 2y ago

>You're going to spend hundreds of hours working together. 4-5 hours is extremely reasonable to make sure it's a good mutual fit. GP specified that these were for entry level candidate. How many people need to give a thumbs up to 'culture fit' (culture fit implies that 1-2 people's opinions should mesh with the rest of the culture, no)? I sure hope you aren't just grilling a college student with 4 hours of quizzes. > If you "spray and pray" then refuse any actual interview processes then you're never going to get a great job. most people out of college don't get (nor in my opinion, need) "great jobs". At least not by what the internet considers a "great job". They should get plenty of training/growth, a liveable salary, and be willing to ask a lot of questions. Interview processes don't seem to promote 2/3 of these, and some industries 3/3. >Every job I've gotten came from identifying a dozen or so opportunities up front and going deep on them. It was a mix. Sometimes spraying worked, sometimes I just got a referral or even blindly approached. I definitely do not recommend going deep for a first job unless that is your dream job and you're staying connected for years with a contact. Even then, layoffs happen, or you simply are passed up. You always need fallbacks and IMO it's not that healthy to put so much emotional investment into one conglomerate like that that will only see you as a number. Take pride in accomplishments, not brands.

Aurornis 2y ago
> I sure hope you aren't just grilling a college student with 4 hours of quizzes. You misunderstood. 4-5 hours was for the entire interview across all steps, not a single 4-5 quiz session. At minimum, you need to have some time for the candidate to ask about the company and learn about the team, too. Suggesting everything gets crammed into a single 1 hour conversation where both parties make a huge decision is not going to work for most. Most candidates won’t even like that these days. They want to talk to the company, not get quizzed for 60 minutes and then asked to quit their current job and join this new company
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I think we are still a bit misaligned. I'll explain my process for my last role as an example. Maybe one too many interviews for my taste, but it was for a senior role, so I'd say it's fine: - 1 recruiter call to align (I personally don't count this, but some do) - 1 call with the technical director focused on language and tool specific questions - 1 call with 3 different team leads (since I was being considered for multiple roles). These were mostly soft questions with some light prodding of concepts. - 1 call with 2 producers for some more soft questions and culture fit - 1 more call with the overall director (basicslly 1 level below founder/c class) for, well, more soft questions and culture fit. - lastly, an offer call with HR (I don't count this, but some do) So I consider it 4 stages, some consider it 6. The times for all of them were around or a little over an hour so there's no issue IMO with call length. Usually 30 minutes of questions, 10 minutes of intro, and then 15 minutes of my own questions. The number of stages felt a tiny bit too obsessive (did I really have to meet a director 3 levels above the chain? I don't think so), but not worth complaining about for a senior role. But still, these were separated 1-1.5 weeks apart, so this process ended up taking 7 weeks from recruiter call to offer letter. That's just so much dead air and it feels like this could have been condensed or abridged somehow. For a new grad this just seems to be madness. Not just the time span but the number of people involved for a single hire at a moderately large company. (And I have gone through that many stages just to get rejected in my junior days). There's not as much to ask a new grad (again, unless you just want to quizz them for hours), not as many people will interface with them on day to day tasks, they will likely negotiate less than a senior unless it's some top student will multiple pending offers. >Most candidates won’t even like that these days. They want to talk to the company, not get quizzed for 60 minutes and then asked to quit their current job and join this new company That'd be preferable for me. But Im not a new grad. I did my time doing 20 hour take homes and grinding Leet code. I was sure hoping there'd be less of that as I have 8 YOE and more direct experience to speak about on my behalf, but it seems that even 10+ years can't escape Leetcode hell. But I digress. Most of the conversation revolved around new grad stuff after all. I understand the need to make sure people with no experience (and an industry with no licensing) have the technical know how. I'd just wish project times were more realistic.

Aeolun 2y ago

> That's preposterous. You're going to spend hundreds of hours working together. 4-5 hours is extremely reasonable to make sure it's a good mutual fit. The point is that you know whether it’s a good fit after 1 hour, so anything after that is just posturing.

themanmaran 2y ago
Not always so. Generally during the first call with a candidate I can filter out the people who clearly aren't going to be a good fit. But I've had people I was really excited to hire totally fail on the technical interview. And in some cases, turn belligerent when pushed on their solutions. There are plenty of engineers who are friendly and really good at talking tech, but missing some underlying qualifications.

Teever 2y ago

Here's a solution. Candidates should be paid for their time in the interview process.

Aurornis 2y ago
Tried that. Word got out that people could get paid for interviews. Got a lot of people using us for paid interview practice with no intention of joining. Stopped doing that.
- Teever 2y ago
  What would happen if it was mandated by law that all prospective employers do this?
  - valicord 2y ago
    So one could just go to a different interview every day and get paid for not working?
    - Teever 2y ago
      It sounds like interviewers would have to change their interview process to account for this. Can you think of some ways that they could innovate the interview process if spurred on my this new constraint?
      - valicord 2y ago
        Most likely find some loophole that lets them keep more or less the same process but doesn't quite reach the legal criteria that require it to be paid.
        Teever 2y ago
        I bet you could think of a few ways to craft the law to eliminate or mitigate this. Let's hear them.

Draiken 2y ago

And who pays the candidates for the hours wasted in these interviews again? Comparing that to the hundreds of hours working together is what is preposterous. If interviews were paid for, then the entire conversation would shift dramatically. Let's remember that 4-5 hours is on the low end for most places IME. I've had places that had a single day with 5 hours of interviews. I had to take a day off from work to make a single interview. Can't we all agree that's absurd? This is extremely unfair on every candidate since they're doing this for multiple companies, all for free, only to then get rejected multiple times for absolutely stupid reasons. The entire system is broken.

lazide 2y ago
4-5 hrs is historically typical.
- Draiken 2y ago
  Having to interview at hundreds of places to find a job is not.
  - lazide 2y ago
    That part? Correct. But I take it you didn’t live through ‘01/dot-com-crash? It was the same, but smaller scale back then. I remember looking for a job and folks were requiring a CS PhD for literal ‘help run a school computer lab’ jobs. Home Depot wouldn’t even consider your resume if you had been in Tech either. One person I talked to (not HD) said that they considered techies ‘overly entitled brats’ and didn’t want to have anything to do with them. This was in the PNW. Previously it was super high pay, no formal education required - as long as you could code. This was before AI or automated applications or the like, so I was doing 15 something manual applications a week. I ended up moving something like 8 states away to take a middle of nowhere software dev job - after applying for over a year - at 1/4 the salary that I had been previously paid. It worked out. Frankly, employers are being pretty mellow considering the market conditions. So far anyway. The biggest issue right now IMO is general confusion and overwhelm + widespread fraud and lying (in both sides of the market) resulting in the market nearly locking up. Which is putting a lot of people in very awkward positions. But things aren’t desperate enough yet to cut through the BS. No one is sure what they really want to do, what is reasonable, or what will work to produce an outcome they want, and that is causing everything to be a giant tarpit. This is what people mean when they say ‘life isn’t fair’. Well, a very mellow version of it.