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Comment by ironman1478 | Hacker News Reader

I don't mind going through a single day with many rounds, but when it's spread out it's super frustrating. It feels really disrespectful of my time. I interviewed at Apple and had like 3 onsites with different teams all in one week and got the results quite quickly. It was such a good experience compared to some companies where it's such a chore.

I also think the attitude of companies during interviews really sucks. Many feel like they're doing you a favor or you're wasting their time. That was a distinct feeling I got when interviewing at Google, but not at Apple and I really think it's why I passed those and not google. They were collaborative and fun at Apple. I put a lot of effort into making candidates at my company feel welcomed and like they are already part of the team and IMO it really helps them succeed.

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I once applied for a job at an oil trading hedge fund in London. The company was small, and everyone who worked there became a partner in the firm once they joined. There were about 23 people there IIRC. I did a 1 hour interview with one guy, a bit technical, a bit of random trivia. Then another guy, similar thing. Then the third guy.

After that I asked how many more interviews I should expect. To my horror the answer I got was "we only hire people if all the partners agree to hire you, we all have veto power, so you should expect to see everyone"... so TWENTY more interviews. I rather abruptly told the guy that was insane and I didn't have time for that, shook his hand and walked out. He seemed perplexed.

... they went bust about a year later.

It can get very demoralising as an interviewer when you interview dozens of candidates, and none meet the bar - and even the ones you rate hire or leaning hire get rejected by the hiring committee. When I first started interviewing (at Google) I was like the Apple interviewers you admire, but I have slowly become inured the process and now I probably give candidates the impression that I've seen it all before and I would rather be doing something else - because it's true.

But the alternative is more filtering before the main round of interviews, to increase the base success rate of candidates, which many people hate (see many other comment threads on this post). And too much would turn off the best candidates probably more than the worse candidates, as they have more outside options.

Part of the problem is that Manton the interview panel do feel like they're wasting their time. It is valuable to the company but for the engineers, they want to get back to coding or whatever else they are working on.

It isn't fair to the person applying because they didn't pick the people on the panel, but if the one doing the interviewing doesn't hide their feeling it's obviously not great.

That's true. I want to say that that's Google's fault right? Because not everybody is on the team you're interviewing for (I might be wrong)? At Apple you are interviewed by the team, who presumably needs another person to assist them.

Also, regardless of whether or not they want to be there, it's a bad look for the company. Somebody took a day off to talk to you, it's only fair that an interviewer reciprocates

Can confirm everything you said is true and that at Google you'll likely never see your interviewers once you start working there but at Apple you'll be working with your interviewers on a daily basis.

It has upsides and downsides, like as you said you had to go through 3 different on-sites (one for each team), but you'll get a good sense of the team before getting an offer (and they'll get a good sense of you). I like the Apple method much better but I had an unusually bad Google interview process so it's possible other people had better experiences.

> at Google you'll likely never see your interviewers once you start working there

Can confirm that this is largely true, with an asterisk.

The interview panel (for SWE candidates) is indeed drawn at random, but it's becoming more and more common to conduct fit interviews for specific roles. This is usually done by the hiring manager, in rare cases also involving other people (e.g. the tech lead).

The good thing about interviewing with your teammates is they will be invested in making it success if they recommended you. If you never see the interviewer again then they have no skin in the game.

Some of the difficulty is that the team may be hiring people because they're currently under-staffed. I've been on teams before where we're 3 engineers on a team that we're trying to hire up to 6 people. It's really hard to both try to keep up the work of 2 people, even in maintenance, and spend hours every week on trying to hire the replacements. Even if the company is good about reducing demands for new work after a departure, it's generally true that you're hiring BECAUSE you need more people on the team, which often means that team is overworked already.

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