(10) Rounds of interviews. Never seen something like this before. This is nuts | Hacker News Reader

(10) Rounds of interviews. Never seen something like this before. This is nuts

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27 pointsbilsbie39 comments

I had the experience of going through 14 rounds of interviews (excluding the HR calls), where the manager and the team liked me. And then had a 15th interview with a “cross functional stakeholder” where the interviewer was super busy and couldn’t schedule an interview for a while, eventually scheduled a 30 min “conversation” where she asked domain specific business questions that you wouldn’t know answers to if you didn’t work in that company and then rejected me for not “getting the right signals”. Never mind the 15 approvals from the interviews prior and the fact that this was a generic software engineering role. This is a company that prior to the interviews said “we value everyone’s time, so if at any point we feel it is not a right fit, we’ll cut the interviews short, even if more are scheduled for the day”. They also apparently schedule the interviews in the increasing order of seniority of the interviewers because they want to ensure they save company time by cutting interviews short and not having the senior interviewers interview candidates that are not a great fit.

Hopefully they paid you for that time they wasted, though I doubt it.

Reminds me of interview code assignments. Sometimes they don’t even care if you solve any problem. Programming is sometimes not the point, and in those cases it comes down code vanity. It’s a test to determine if the interviewer can read the code, because they probably can’t, even with ample code comments and test coverage and formal documentation, and somehow that is the fault of the candidate with several hours wasted.

At any rate I have signals that I look for during the interview, that I learned while unemployed, and I try to drop out as early as possible if it smells childish.

Do you give them feedback about why?

I've only had one that I had to cut short recently, and I did.

I wasn't sure if I should or not. I can think of valid reasons why to do it and valid reasons not to.

I don’t if the process is standardized for the company. In that case you don’t do anything beyond sounding salty. If it’s a team specific thing, then yeah, I try to point it out in the most polite way possible.

I recently had a “culture fit round” at a company, again for a software engineering position, where I had to meet 3 people (one in sales, one in legal and one was the receptionist for the building) and chit chat for 45 mins. Not that I did poorly, but the whole thing was kinda awkward and didn’t really add any value except confirm that I was not an introvert (which I totally am, but can pretend I am not for short amount of time).

I saw a post on X a few days ago from a hiring manager. She had recently filled a job posting for a senior engineer, and had received almost 650 applications. I asked her how many of them were juniors, and she said only about 120.

That's 500 senior engineers to compete with, and in this kind of market you're going to see more and more of these unfair hiring practices. If you need 10 interviews to assess a candidate, something is wrong with you.

The purpose is to make sure you have a desperate person you can force worse conditions on.

Why do you think she's qualified to determine who's a senior and who's junior?

Because that was her job as hiring manager and she personally reviewed them (she made that clear in the post)

Usually the managers rely on the TL's opinions when it comes to technical abilities, in my experience.

That sounds like most juniors are pimping out their CVs with ChatGPT.

You’re probably right. Though I’ve applied for 70+ jobs in the last 6 months with a carefully written resume/cv sans gpt, and I haven’t had so much as a screen. It’s a depressing time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/careerguidance/comments/1dusven/im_...

Thanks, a lot of these Tech Influencers on Twitter really like to post screenshots without giving source to the original link (and shamelessly promote their stuff once it goes viral)

Klaviyo did 7 interviews with me and then rescinded a verbal offer because they said they "forgot" they dont hire people in my state.

I wouldn't recommend that screwed up company to anyone :)

edit: oh and they tried multiple times to get me to move to any state they hired without any relocation money, lol.

Ten is definitely excessive. A phone screen and half-day panel is sufficient to make a call. If you're asking candidates to keep coming back for another round, that's a sign of a dysfunctional organization where no one wants to make decisions.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/careerguidance/comments/1dusven/im_...

In my last position we spent our time trying to shorten and cut down the selection process as much as possible. One half hour phone call, one face to face interview for most roles.

Last October I decided to leave and hired my replacement as CTO. That process was more involved but, even then, only three stages: one online, two face to face.

You can really only indulge these ridiculously convoluted processes if you’re a famous company where many people want to work and will put up with your bullshit to achieve that end.

But, make no mistake, FAANG or not, this is not good hiring practice and is extremely disrespectful of interviewees’ time. Not to mention wasting a lot of your teams’ time on endless interviews.

Even if you did eventually receive an offer, the department has already proven to be extremely dysfunctional. If you were to accept such an offer, you will be a victim to such dysfunction there every day. If you are desperate, keep going, otherwise abort and never exceed five rounds.

why not directly a link to the reddit thread?

If bilsbie == Catalin, then this looks like cheap self-promotion.

Doesn't seem so but your comment made me check bilsbie's profile and I realized something. I'm busting my ass off posting real comments and getting downvoted the hell out of it while this clown posts random news titles probably scraped automatically and using a script and has like 100x the amount of karma compared to me.

Well I learned one more thing.

I just try to post a couple things per day that I think the community might find interesting. Sorry that annoys you.

yeah, pure spam, not even self promotion

On MacOS and probably on iPhone as well you can right click text in images and easily search for it.

So Apple users do the obvious low effort thing and just post images instead of text. This is toxic in a similar way to using iMessage instead of something like Whatsapp for group chats.

It makes more people buy Apple so the stock goes up though.

This doesn't seem out of the norm? For my current job, I had 10 rounds.

* First call with recruiter.

* Call with hiring manager to discuss team fit.

* Phone screen.

* 5 rounds of onsite.

* Another call with recruiter.

* Final call with VP and skip level manager.

I've never had more than two interviews for a job.

Edit: three if you count talking with a recruiter, which I've only done for one job.

Guess it depends on what is meant by "norm". Have I ever had 10 rounds before? Yes. But the vast majority of companies don't have that many interviews.

If I had to say a typical norm (from initial screen to offer letter, in terms of number of different people I spoke to) I think I'd say, like, 4-6.

5 rounds on side seems excessive, but maybe this is just how things are done nowadays.

5 rounds on different days?

5 rounds in 1 day, with a lunch break in between. For a bog-standard developer IC role.

I wouldn't call that 10 rounds.

1 phone screen and 1 on-site, followed by another couple of phone screens.

Yeah, that's the critical thing. Five interviews in one day on one onsite is pretty normal in my experience. Five different days would be insane (maybe for a very high level, director/VP/etc.).

At that point this is simply power tripping.

Eventually you realize that a lot of these tech companies are simply "the blind leading the blind."

The answer to this question is easy. The company does this because they can afford to do it because they have other candidates willing to do it. Also some people don’t want to hire you and others are on the fence. The extra meet is for those on the fence. You are not a stellar candidate.

Whether you do it or not depends on how much you want the job.

This one. They are doing the same with another 5-10-20-50 people. Walking away after the 5th only makes their life/job easier. I get it that some companies want to be 110% sure about the person, and not take chances with 'just' 3-4 interviews, in which some things may be left untouched/not discussed thoroughly, dropping the level of certainty to 70%.

Start billing for time after the third one

>"(10) Rounds of interviews. Never seen something like this before. This is nuts"

Advice (in video form!):

Monty Python - Silly job interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v1OLMjG52I

Also:

Revenge Of The Nerds -- Tug Of War Scene:

https://youtu.be/S9iJlfVMstA?t=124

"You win!" :-)

(The entire Universe works on only 3 principles -- Push, Pull, and Balance (John Ernst Worrell Keely)... Balance is basically "letting go". If Pushing to get what you want in a specific circumstance doesn't work, try Pulling... If Pulling doesn't work to get what you want in a specific circumstance, try Pushing... but perhaps most importantly, if neither Pushing nor Pulling work -- then try "letting go" (that is, let the Universe decide where it wants to go!))

In the video above, The Nerds wisely realized that they did not have the raw strength to beat the Jocks in the Tug-Of-War!

So did they try with all of their intent, all of their strength, all of their effort -- to somehow win the Tug-Of-War against the Jocks?

No they didn't!

They simply timed their move exactly right, and they "let go" -- at the most inopportune time for the Jocks!

"You win!" says the nerd Harold Wormser (played by Andrew Cassese) so eloquently, after the strength that the Jocks used is "used against them" -- and they have all fell down upon one another!

:-) <g> :-)

Point is -- you have jobs that require interview after interview after interview... filling out bureaucratic form after bureaucratic form... and going through that process only for a chance (not a guarantee!) to get hired at the end of it...

Then, on the other side of the spectrum, you have jobs which only require a handshake.

I prefer jobs towards the handshake side of the spectrum (a few forms and a few interviews are OK) than the bureaucratic thousands of interviews and thousands of forms side, and then only for the chance at getting a job -- not for a guarantee...

Also, does anyone at companies requiring 10+ interviews actually do any work?

How could they, if everyone working for the company is interviewing everyone who's applying for the company, all of the time?

Maybe they should create a future company called "The Interview Company" -- their tagline could be something like:

"We interview people for your company... so you don't have to..." :-)

You know, outsourced interviewing... which could then be used for outsourced labor... everything could be outsourced -- and AI could handle the rest... <g> :-) <g>

Jesus, that's an obscene read!

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