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.

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.

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.

Wow, and I thought the 8 interviews (each around 45 minutes iirc) I did for Apple was excessive.

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!