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for me, at least, one interview process being 9 hours isn't a big deal and i agree with you that a company doing that is likely to have a more coherent culture and make smarter hiring decisions.

the problem is that when the job market isn't too hot, you might be applying to a dozens or even a hundred+ positions. if 5-10 of those all have 9 hour processes, well now you have 1-2 full weeks work of unpaid interviewing to do, which is a lot to organize, prepare for, etc.

The only time I see people blitzing interviews and stacking 5-10 different companies interview processes is when they’re unemployed urgently trying to change jobs. In those cases it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to stack interviews.

For normal job changing, people are more selective and interview maybe a couple times per year, spread out over time. In my experience it hasn’t been hard at all to get 3 hours here and there for interviews. Tech company culture is usually forgiving about people leaving for appointments and other things so this isn’t nearly as hard as it is for some of my friends in other careers where it’s PTO every time.

I’ve also not actually seen many cases where people schedule 10 interviews at once and actually get the full interview experience at every one of them. People get rejected at earlier stages of the interview process or they start pulling out if they realize the job isn’t a good fit. It would be very rare for someone to schedule 10 interviews and actually invest the maximum time into every single one of them.

So I understand your concern, but in my observation this pattern doesn’t really happen. People have been doing much more involved interviews (travel, flights, hotels) for decades.

>In those cases it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to stack interviews.

right, people will do it, but then they'll complain on a forum about having to spend 60+ hours (with prep time) for a handful of interviews with no guarantee of a position and i think that's a fair complaint to make.

>I’ve also not actually seen many cases where people schedule 10 interviews at once and actually get the full interview experience at every one of them. People get rejected at earlier stages of the interview process or they start pulling out if they realize the job isn’t a good fit.

sure, but even if you drop out partway through the process, the prep time remains the same, you're still blocking out time and scheduling, you're still occupied for a portion of the day, etc.

>So I understand your concern, but in my observation this pattern doesn’t really happen.

i have observed it often enough with my former students (and sometimes current ones) to be understanding of the people complaining about a 9 hour interview.

> right, people will do it, but then they'll complain on a forum about having to spend 60+ hours (with prep time) for a handful of interviews with no guarantee of a position and i think that's a fair complaint to make.

This is an acceptable filter for me on both sides of the table.

You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Where you work should be a major life decision. These are the humans and craft you’re going to spend your time with/on for 40+ hours a week for years. You aren’t going to get a glimmer of understanding of the culture, people, and work in a single 45 minute interview (short of major red flags).

If all you’re doing is looking for a job, any job, I get this sentiment - and the other side of the table needs to be looking for a butt in a seat, any butt, and then these shotgun interviews work.

But if you’re optimizing for career and quality of life, having an extended diligence process is a pro, not a con. Especially since that means the team you’re joining has passed muster in the same diligence process when they were hired.

A strong diligence process signals the company takes who they hire seriously - and that the people who work there take where they work seriously.

Nobody doing long interviews is doing it blindly. It's because you're already passed some reasonable level of screening that mostly resembles a regular 45 minute type interview.

And how about people who have a job that they just don’t like that much, and would love to escape.

Having 9 rounds of interviews sounds crazy excessive. Why is the 9th interview needed that you couldn’t have figured out by the 8th interview? If regular companies do that, I opt out, it’s a don that they are delusional, inefficient, incapable of making decisions and don’t respect candidates time and potentially different life circumstances (candidates might have family, full time work, hobbies, other interviews).

On the other hand, their company is quite unique, I bet they have enough applicants, so in the end it’s supply and demand, and companies in extreme demand can make their interview process as tiring as they wish…

I guess oxide gets away with it because they have the podcast and lots of people know a lot about the company and are pretty sure they want to work there. It's like would you do a nine hour interview to find out if you can go on a date with some random person from a dating app, no, but would you spend 9 hours with someone that you see potential to be your future wife or husband when there's mutual interest? Yes

On the other hand, in my 20 year career the only real interview I did was for my first job. Every one after that was from people I worked with recruiting me to work with them somewhere, and the interview process was more about pitching me on their company.

Sometimes i wonder if I would have a better career if I was more proactive in my job searches, but I do enjoy the experience of being pursued a lot more enjoyable than pursuing.

This is very well put. There are different ways to 'pre-filter' the candidate pool, from quizzes to purity tests. What a many startups don't seem to understand is that the 'culture' is the people and what they do. So taking care in interviews tends to hire people who take care in their work. And unlike the gp comment I never felt 'bad' after a number of hours of interviews and a decline, I had a better understanding of the company, presumably they had a better understanding of me.

Reading the article though it was interesting that having a positive EBITDA was the real news here. Not a single AI company can claim that. That's a pretty big milestone.

> There are different ways to 'pre-filter' the candidate pool

Reading the replies here, most are assuming that every candidate gets the maximum interview duration. I see a lot of arguments that if someone applies to M jobs and each requires N hours of interviews then they're spending M*N hours without knowing they'll get a job.

Usually you don't get scheduled for interviews at all unless there's a good chance that they expect you to pass the hiring bar. When you are scheduled for interviews, they don't go straight to the full gauntlet until the early interviews show promise.

So by the time someone goes through the 3 x 3 hour interviews in this example, there's probably a very good chance that they're being seriously considered as a hire.

I agree with this. Also I empathize with the trauma a lot of tech people are going through in the current market because of my experiences in the 'chip downturn', 'dot com downturn' and the 'economic downturn in the late naughts'. So I'm seeing a lot of 'maxing' like this; "I send out 10,000 resumes and maybe get 1,000 people interested, and 100 people willing to interview me, and this takes 9 months and I've only got a few more months of 401k I can eat up ... ahhhhhhhh!" My experiences going through these sources of downturns changed me a lot, I don't see how it couldn't have.

> It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.

I think part of the reason is that interviews have gotten more adversarial as time has gone on. Ie less respect for the interviewee, more of a power dynamic, more careless wasted time in lazy take home assignments, etc.

I wouldn't mind 9 hour interviews to 3 companies if i knew i'd land the job. It's the 1,000 companies that many people experience that gives them pause after so much disrespect through time.

"Job interviews" in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours. There weren't even quizzes to see if you really could program, let alone leetcode-grinding insanity.

Once a system gets gamed en masse, anti-gaming measures dominate, and ruin, the whole process. See also: ads vs. ad blockers, and the fact that you can't run a fucking email server of your own anymore without jumping through security hoops.

> "Job interviews" in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours. There weren't even quizzes to see if you really could program

How far back are you referring to? I'm definitely not the oldest person around here, but most of my interviews since graduating college were more than casual conversations.

The exceptions were primarily where I was coming in via a referral or they were hiring me for something that was already proven and verifiable, like open source contributions.

When I was coming up in the 90s what I found was it was mostly conversational, sometimes with some whiteboarding although of a much more relaxed nature than contemporary whiteboarding. It was more a tool to help express your thoughts and draw pictures than writing code.

There were some companies like Microsoft who were starting to become known for being more intense, but I never came across that.

It wasn't until the mid-aughts that I started to see brain teasers, "real" whiteboarding, and other aspects that started to bleed into standard interviews.

I'm to understand that Microsoft was one of the companies that had more relaxed interviews in the early 90s, and then took a turn for the more intensive in the mid-90s.

Perhaps the turning point was Jim McCarthy's "beware of a guy in a room", which he meant both figuratively and literally, leading to a transition away from solo or shared offices or even cubicles for software engineers and toward open-plan arrangements. I think that his wisdom led first Microsoft, then the rest of the industry, to treat software engineers not as the darling whiz kids they were in the past, but more a cohort to be closely watched and controlled, as the company is risking a lot on them.

my first job at a startup (first engineer after the founders) consisted of 13 hours on the phone with the CTO over a few weeks and then an in person all day interview that included traveling from Chicago to SF and a couple of dinners with the founders. this was 1996. our typical interviews after joining were all day affairs and they people almost all people that were referred in or had worked with in the past (I wasn't).

interviews at twitter back in 2010 were 6 hours and that was true even for me when we had an agreement to acquire my company pending the success of those interviews. at the time they had a lot of ex-googlers and they were setup similarly.

My first job in 2004 was a pretty casual conversation. My next few through the 00s were basically the same tbh.

I've worked as an employee, a contractor, and owned my own firm and hired. Seen all sides.

Until the last few years, the idea of hours and hours of interviews wasn't a thing. I interviewed at IBM and was hired after two, 1 hour interviews. One of those over the phone.

I can't even envision what these interviews are all for. It feels like people attempting over the top risk management, without really scoping the risk. It feels quite disorganized.

Well, bullshit actually. When I went to Sun in 1996, I was flown out for a full day of interviews (9 hours!) plus both lunch and dinner. (And this was true for more or less every company I interviewed with.)

I'm not sure why people are indexing so hard on the interviews, as we matriculate very few candidates into conversations; if you want to complain about something, complain about the written nature of our hiring process.[0]

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003

Yes, I definitely had some full day interviews back then, including travel time.

The largest difference I have found between then and now is what the interview actually consists of, not how long they last.

What are the differences in what the interviews consist of?

btw congrats on the company. i was skeptical at the time but it was never because you wouldn't attract awesome talent and make great hires. your process looks great to me.

Thanks! And don't worry -- there were PLENTY of reasons for skepticism in 2019! We got lucky many times over, hitting on stuff that turned out to be really important in ways that we couldn't know at the time.

The hiring process is a very concrete example of that. What still blows my mind (at least a little) is that our process came directly out of one of the worst moments in my career: making an absolutely terrible hire about two years before we started Oxide. For a while after that, I wished I could go back and warn my previous self to not make the hire that would be so destructive to the organization -- but in the years at Oxide I have come to realize that that terrible hire was in fact essential for the future Oxide: it was the impetus for putting together a writing-intensive process, and there is no doubt in my mind that I had I not made this atrocious hire, I would have continued to hire the (broken) way that I had been hiring. (I described this a bit in my conversation with Gergely Orosz on hiring.[0])

Anyway: don't get me near the time machine -- I'll only screw things up.

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/hiring-proc...

in Sun's defense, that was in the 1990s, before the invention of the telephone.

Thank you for caring about us.

I think people are just generally grousing about Interview length, not about your company specifically. Don't worry about it. It's not aimed directly at you.

I know in my case, it's not about you directly.

I firmly believe it's because someone getting fired, for poor performance, is a huge deal now.

Where I am, exposing someones poor performance is more of an exhibition in the failure of the hiring process and all involved. So, you just keep the under-performers around.

Could be.

My experience more closely matches yours, but I've also done the multiple rounds of painful interviews.

I do find that the latter can be explained by care and concern, and also by organization chaos and poor boundaries. It's hard to tell until you're in them, but I try to avoid the latter whenever I can.

As another commenter mentioned - I now respect companies that take their time in hiring. The last thing I want is to jump on with some company that will hire anyone. But there is an element of respect - if you're just duplicating questions and wasting my time? GTFO here.

IBM - well, that tells us all :) seriously though, you may be referencing the dot com era, when a warm body was all that sufficed

> It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.

I've never been flown somewhere for a multi-day process. 5-hours or less of actual interview time on those for me. The lead-up was usually 3-or-fewer 1hr calls.

Yeah, the travel eats up some other time, but that's different than being grilled for 3 hours straight on three separate days.

I agree with the "that seems overly excessive" position.

I'm very curious what marginal signal they think they get from hours 6-9.

9 hours is certainly excessive considering there's only 8 hours or less in a work day!

It's over several days. This used to be a pretty normal thing in hiring processes!

That has never been a normal thing in hiring processes. Normal within Silicon Valley maybe, but normal overall in the US? Absolutely not.

Yes, it is normal, especially at the salary that we pay (currently $275K). To take but one domain: at that salary, you are (roughly) at the level of a school superintendent for a school district with thousands of students (like, large town/small city). If you have ever been associated with hiring someone in that kind of position, you will see a VERY time intensive process, with many hours of interviews with many stakeholders. So yes, we have an intensive process -- but we take hiring very seriously, and we believe that it shows in our extraordinary team.

Oh how I wish you guys would hire new grads. I got into kernel dev partly due to zfs and partly due to Redox OS. Well atleast I have worked with Redox now, hopefully someday with you guys too :)

I call BS. Google didn’t have that many hours of interviews for L5 and it’s TC and the TC is around 500k between cash and liquid RSUs.

The comparison to a superintendent is bunk because that’s a politically loaded position so the vetting is high because of that, not the comp.

None of the FAANG gang put up 9 hours of interviews and pay more than Oxide.

Just own it, your process is more time consuming and is NOT normal. But it’s what gives you an extraordinary team. FAANGs are filled with bad hires.

Its simple. Go to Google then. FAANG gang is decades older than Oxide and 3-4 order of magnitude higher revenue. They can hire hundreds of people a year who never do an hour of useful work in a year and still be fine. A startup can't do that.

Apple will happily put you through 8 rounds if interviews lol

I have had to fly and stay multiple days overnight in New York City, Minneapolis, and Atlanta for job interview processes in the past. This was absolutely the norm. What's not normal is a couple relatively brief online transactions (2-3 Zoom interviews, a work sample test) clinching a job. That's quite new.

If anything the hiring practices have gotten much shorter.

I’ve had the _Batesvilke Casket Company_ in _Batesville Indiana_ demand I come in for multi-day interviews.

Well that just makes sense. You can't be too careful hiring casketmakers.

To be fair, Batesvilles owners, until recently, were famous for innovation in caskets.

Not so much for short interview cycles.

I remember before COVID trying to interview multiple places and time it where offers will land at the same time. I remember flying 3 times in one week (!) to make this happen. We have it easy now :).

Back in the days of ZIRP and you could get a job just by showing up it wasn't so bad. Nowadays I certainly wouldn't bother unless it was for a dream job.

An 8 hour interviewing day plus an hour on the front end (screen) or back end (confirm/double check some things/really meet manager) can make sense.

3x 3 hours sounds -exhausting-.

> An 8 hour interviewing day plus an hour on the front end (screen) or back end (confirm/double check some things/really meet manager) can make sense.

> 3x 3 hours sounds -exhausting-.

I think most people would prefer 3 x 3 hour blocks.

A 3 hour block could be worked into a day without anyone batting an eye at every (tech) employer I've ever had. People go to appointments all the time.

A full 8 hour interviewing day requires taking the day off. It's also exhausting to do it all continuously.

The 3 x 3 hour structure also allows the company or candidate to end it early if it doesn't look like it's going to be a fit. I'd rather lose 3 hours and than take a vacation day, spend 8 hours somewhere, and then get rejected if they knew I wasn't a good fit after the first few hours.

How many of those extended processes ended in a no?