5 rounds is insane, and to me it's the mark of a severely dysfunctional company.
Don't even get me started on multiple choice personality tests taken by wannabe psychologists in HR, or the general idiocy that is whiteboard coding.
Not really. I had 7 rounds for my current role. Granted it's not a coding role, but for many roles that touch many aspects of an organization it's important to meet as many people as possible for both the organization and the interviewee.
In France, engineers usually have 3 months notice period. So if you hire someone who already has a job, you have to wait for 3+ months for the new hire to leave the previous job. If that's a bad choice and you have to fire, you have to start again for the next candidate.
If it were me, I would have moved on to the next company where 2 or less rounds are more than sufficient.
If each round included multiple interviewers, we're firmly in clown show territory. If you need that many interviewers, your interviewers aren't on the same page or properly calibrated.
It's a poor candidate experience. And from an interviewer perspective, getting 6+ people in a room is cumbersome and it'll be nigh impossible to come to a consensus. I routinely am an interviewer with Amazon and it's hard to navigate interview debriefs with four interviewers, a neutral third-party (i.e. 'bar raiser') and recruiter in the room.
As an interviewer, I wouldn't participate in an interview process that had 6+ interviewers. As a candidate, the company better be doubling my six figure salary before I'll consider subjecting myself to that clown show.
It was indeed a bit of a clown show, and everyone agreed it was bad, but as long as I was there, I don't think it changed much.
If we say half an hour for screening and 2h for onsite, that's 2.5h total for interviewing - seems very reasonable to me (still 5 rounds but it doesn't sound as scary).
Of course, I'm coming up with a generous interpretation of things. Some companies do take multiple cycles of interviewing and waiting for feedback after each one which is very tedious. My point is that you need to look a bit deeper than the number of rounds to get an idea of how smooth the interview process is.
The onsite, frequently, has 3-5 interviews each an hour long.
On site is after the initial 1-2 rounds of screening.
I have not seen a single company hire with less than 4 rounds ever. Mostly, it's 5-8.
Sent two emails focused on the area I wanted to work:
Company A: - Email the next day to schedule first call - 15 minutes hr talk (mostly if salary, way of work, etc aligned) - 60 minutes vp of engineering (my experience, challenges the company is facing, talk shop) - 30 minutes with cto (they selling me on their company) - Offer after 2 hours of ending the chat with the cto.
All this in the span of 4 days (could have been faster but time conflicts)
Company B: - Email same day to schedule call - 15 call with recruiter (salary, expectations, etc) - 1:30 call with tech lead + someone else I forgot (talk about my experience, shop, and included a quick simple 20 minute coding challenge) - Offer the next day
Span of a week and a half since there were some holidays involved.
In 20+ years of being a developer, I only once had more than 3 interviews to get a job (Spotify almost a decade ago). Some are quick one hour chats, one was just having lunch with the CEO and CTO for an hour and chatting, Had 1-2 that were coding challenges and then 30 minutes chat.
I would never ever work for a company that required 5-8 interviews. Jesus christ
edit: At the company I am leaving, currently the process is:
- After initial email, first call with CEO to assess match, culture, etc - Interview with me for an hour. We do 2 small coding challenges (your own editor, you chose the language, get information before hand, etc).
If 2nd interview goes well, we put an offer, if it doesn't, we give an option of them doing a small take home (4h max, but we hope no-one does more than 2h) if they want to continue with the process. If this goes well, offer, if it doesn't, we may have another call to let them 'explain' their code and solutions. At this point, is either an offer or a no.
Yes, technically it can be 4 interviews, but they are mostly to give more 'opportunities' to folks that may not be as good in a type of interview vs another type.
Another small company I am interviewing for, had a screening, a take home, discussion of the take home, and now a 3 round onsite.
All remote:
1 take-home code+essay test
1 technical discussion interview
2 management/consulting interviews (the role is pre-sales consultancy)
1 CEO interview which was essentially congratulatory, having passed the others
Second round was the following week, four almost-back-to-back 45-minute sessions, each with a different person. The last was hiring manager's manager.
Third round was the following week, and was that manager's manger.
Offer came after that.
Oh, this was because of a personal referral, that might have eliminated a round?
In any case, I had three "rounds" but talked to six people.
You can twist this all you like, but that is not a functional organization.
As it happens, each interviewer focused on different things, by prior arrangement. One person walked me through a coding exercise, while another asked about mentorship and infra-team communication, while still another focused more on intra-team communication and process. Six interviews in, I was still being asked new and different questions than I'd gotten before, and I was still asking new and different questions than I'd asked before.
At the level I'm talking about, and given that I wasn't unemployed, the interview process is as much about me deciding whether I want to switch jobs as it is them deciding whether they want to hire me. I had different questions for each of the people I talked to, suited to their level, and even where some of my questions were the same, I got different answers from the people I talked to, again, based on their level. I couldn't very well probe the hiring manager about company focus in the same way I could the VP of Engineering, and in fact it was the higher-level employees that sold me on the job.
All in all, 4.5 hours is not a ton of time for them to get to know me, or for me to get to know them. Given the amount of money involved and the level of the position, the number of people I talked to seemed very restrained.
If someone that reports to you does an interview, and you then follow up by interviewing the same person, yes, that means exactly you don't trust your report's judgement. Of course they're going to have slightly different questions; they are different human beings.
I can't think of a clearer example of being unable to delegate than redoing your underling's work.
5 rounds seems insane, 1 seems inefficient. Why 'waste' the time of several busy employees to interview a candidate that one person could quickly rule out in one interview.
1 - Uncertain about something about you (I imagine technical aptitude), and want to rule out their concern 2 - There are 2 close candidates
Either way you should confirm that it is the final stage, confirm what they'd need to see to hire you and if you are feeling confident maybe use it to negotiate salary!
Sounds like you are close to getting the job though so I wouldn't dismiss it especially if you have no doubts about the company!
Needing to check the technical aptitude of someone after 5 previous interviews means your interviewing process is broken, or you're trying to convince yourself that a weak candidate is good enough. Neither option is a ringing endorsement of decision making at the company.
You can write them off based on this, but it's not pragmatic. Downside another hour of their life vs $$$ increase from the role. That 60 mins could be the difference between X00k!
> 1 - Uncertain about something about you (I imagine technical aptitude), and want to rule out their concern
They've already done live coding with you but they're not sure about your technical aptitude. So they're going to do more of the same thing that didn't work for them before. This says a lot about the company's habits.
> 2 - There are 2 close candidates
There are two close candidates. They're especially close in "live coding" ability. Let's have an async code-off! Why is live coding so important to the company? Is the other candidate going through this, too? Is the point of this really just to see which of you will swallow more BS? This also says a lot about how the company works.
If you don't want the job, don't do the interview.
Every other comment is here is just some HN commentary on the interview process and what is appropriate or not.
Ignore the noise of the commentary - if it offends you that they are asking you for another interview go find another job it's probably not going to be a good fit for you as you are starting out on a slightly aggrieved position.
I also don't see many positive outcomes in which you say to your next team that you are working with: "I've given you enough time to make a decision, make it" - it also puts you in a bad place to start your relationship.
Is it annoying? Probably and maybe be emblematic of a poorly run team could also just be that everyone seems to be struggling with hiring these days.
The company's interview behavior sends signals about what it's like to work for the company. Will getting a promotion be so full of indecision? What about architectural changes?
And why are the people there afraid to make decisions? Is it an overbearing boss? Something in the water? I can only guess.
your questions:
- Should I go for it? Up to you obviously
- Are they reliable? No
- Is it acceptable / worth it? Unknown
- What would you do? Depends on whether I have other irons in the fire. If this was my only option and I still like this option, despite being messed around at this stage, then I would stay in process, so long as I could guarantee that I would not hold resentment, as this will come across on coding challenge and further interactions with team.
Good luck, whatever you decide!
Side note, if this company can’t pick someone after after interviewing candidates 4x, it seems to me they don’t really understand what they want / fungible requirements are endemic to their culture. That may or may not be a desirable feature in this potential employer.
Only situation I can possibly imagine that being the case is high powered executive being headhunted from a rival (or if its a "happy to have a further call to discuss the offer we made, or for you to come in and meet the team before you make your mind up" situation) not a dev being set additional coding challenges because someone somewhere in the process isn't quite sure about their relevant skill level [relative to another candidate] yet.
This is a sign of chaotic internal processes, not to mention a culture of disrespect toward candidates’ time.
If you get the job, expect work to be regularly dropped in your lap on a Friday afternoon to prep for a meeting on Monday with higher-ups. This meeting will be canceled.
Expect pervasive overconfidence and excessive process (who does six rounds of interviews unless they think they “only hire the best”?).
And, when you need some additional headcount on your team, expect it to arrive sometime the quarter after next, too late to be of much help.
But yeah if you need the paycheck, what are you gonna do?
This gets them out of their "so many choices" analysis paralysis mode and if they like you enough, into a FOMO mode where they risk losing to to an unnamed competitor. If it doesn't get them into a FOMO mode, then they weren't that into you in the first place and you saved the time waste.
$0.02.
Are you interviewing at Google? Or, if not, will they pay you the same as Google? If no, find an employer with a sane interview process.
- do you want to work with them?
- do you care, or are you just trying to find anything?
- are you busy? that's a lot of interviews, but maybe you have the time?
- how have the interviews been thus far? interesting and high-bandwidth or a confused waste of time
> Should I go for it? Are they reliable, is it acceptable/worth it? What would you do?
Kind of all depends on your situation.
How have the interviews gone, from your perspective? You have been evaluating the company during them, right? (if not, please start, asking your own questions during interviews is _extremely_ important)
At any sane company, them asking for another interview should mean they're serious, they wouldn't want to spend one of their engineer's time otherwise.
I'd probably just do it, but I'd definitely set a limit for myself (communicating that limit may be a mistake). I'd probably also re-ask what the process is from here, what's the next step(s)?
Or maybe they pushed the code you wrote in your previous round to prod and got an issue so now they need you to fix it ;)
This is insightful and it's often true that an interviewer will ask you a question in a generic context in an area they're stuck. Seen it several times on both sides.
Also, as others have pointed out, it's not clear what a "round" means to you. Where I work, we typically have two rounds: Screening (typically 2 meetings), and full panel (6-8 meetings). Before Covid, the full panel round was done in-person in a single day. Now it might be spread out, but it's still one round. Meetings between the candidate and the recruiter don't count as a round.
Personally, if they can't get their interviews right (they forgot to test for something?), I don't trust them to be a good employer.
Alternatively, if you really need the job, then yes you should participate in the interview.
I really wouldn’t overindex on it. Others are saying it’s a bad sign about their internal procedures and culture which, sure yeah it’s not an ideal way to run an interview process. But that might just mean that the HM did it in a previous job and it worked out well, or the recruiting head thinks it’s a good idea, and everything else is fine about the company.
For the sake of an hour of your time and some extra interview practice- just do the interview. If you want, use this thread to guide your questions after you get an offer and figure out whether there are other signs of internal dysfunction. But turning down a job you want because of this one blip in the interview process would strike me as petulant.
Round 1: Screening for strategic fit. Round 2: Paired coding interview (~ 1.5 hrs) Round 3: Detailed interview with co-founder. Round 4: Panel interview with team I was to work with.
It didn't feel insane, in fact the more I interviewed, I pretty much got a detailed picture of what I would do if on that job, and who I would work with. Lots of times you can't get that sort of peek into your prospective workplace.
The thing that made this process bearable was : 1) niceness of people involved 2) Having a fairly limited coding phase....
So as long as these are not all coding phases, it will give you a really good view of the org fit for you.
> Are they reliable
well, depends on the company.
I ended up doing the challenge because I thought it would be a good learning experience and a way to ask questions and learn (even) more about the company.
I was offered the job straight away but turned it down because I felt the company was dysfunctional as many of you suggested, slow to make decisions and slightly chaotic. There were some nice people and unfortunately some (potentially/seemingly) toxic ones.
Can't justify accepting it when the market is so good right now and there so many good options out there. I will keep looking. Thanks once again all of you for your help. I read your comments with great interest.
I would have been honest with them, tell them you didn't expect a 6th, ask them if they think you are close to getting the job, else it will be a waste of effort on your end.
Assuming there are indeed internal doubts, then chances are there's a person in power who is casting those doubts. Could be for example there's a preferred candidate who that person in power already set their eyes on. And the inexperienced hiring manager is not seeing that.
Good luck either way.
Edit: I would probably ask which topics the earlier test missed, and whether it's possible to hop on a call with <insert developer name here> to share your thoughts about those topics instead.
I would politely decline but I guess it boils down to how badly you want this job.
They’re looking to test for that specific thing, in my experience when this happens it’s usually pretty easy to pass.
Of course if you’re on the fence yourself I also think it’s reasonable to use this as justification for not taking the role. Plaid had me do 2 separate full day on sites and I rejected them for that reason alone.
We do it in 2 where i work. I guess you could say 3 if you count the hr call asking if your interested and eligible to work in the US.
Glass half-full: you still have not been rejected
If it isn't, don't.
There's an opportunity.
And an opportunity cost.
Maybe it is a test of how you handle last minute changes.
Good luck.