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So why, then, has this interview process become so typical? Why has it become almost a rite of passage that you then subject your future coworkers to during their hiring processes?

As someone going through interviews in a tech city for a buzzword job, I am definitely going through this, and my family and friends are aghast at how many days worth of effort I end up putting in for each rejection letter... Or, worse, to finally get to the in-person interview only to find out that it's a brogrammer culture and I don't want to work there in the first place.

For the same reason that you still find casting couches in Hollywood: the supply of candidates exceeds the number of positions.

The "talent shortage" term that is so frequently used is misleading. Companies like Google and Facebook, as well as high-profile startups, can see hundreds of applications for every open position. Most of the candidates might not be as talented as these employers would like, but that doesn't mean they don't have a lot of warm bodies willing to subject themselves to a recruiting process that resembles a meat grinder.

This looks like the typical Google interview and they had that going for a long time[1].

My theory is that some companies want to be google-like and hope that by trying to apply the same interview practices they might be successful in finding and attracting the same top talent as Google attracted/attracts.

[1] I interviewed with them a while back.

The screener + in-person interview format has worked quite well for Google (and other companies before it, I might add, but Google's was the most publicized) and are used by now by other behemoths such as Yahoo and Facebook.

Smaller companies either copy directly, or have alumni from larger corporations that are used to this process.

> and possibly even a third hour-long phone call.

Ok, they're going into crazyville here.

> If you’ve managed to impress them so far, and the company has a particularly thorough interview process, they might invite you back for a fifth interview to finally make a determination.

No thanks, please don't waste more of my time.

> During which you’ll spend no less than five hours making an attempt to solve a practical problem the company has faced recently. If you’re the right man (or woman) for the job, your references check out, and you can pass a background check, you’ll be made an offer and given two days to make a decision. This is the San Francisco startup interview process.

I've already accepted a better offer already.

Eh, if I were unemployed and didn't have anything better I was working on, I wouldn't mind going through that process.

I always interview with multiple companies in parallel, though, so if it takes you too long to make a decision some other company will snap me up. "Breadth-first search, weighted by expected value."

The problem is this is supposed to be a tight labor market. A company cannot afford a process like this in such a market.

Of course, if the market is tight because everyone is picky...

The market is tight for what companies perceive as high-value candidates. The reason why the hiring process is long despite that tight market is that companies can't know the candidate is high value unless several interviews.

> Eh, if I were unemployed and didn't have anything better I was working on...

Your time doesn't become any less valuable because you're unemployed. Engaging in an employer's insane and inefficient three-ring circus seems like an awfully bad use of one's time. That time should be invested in pursuing opportunities that don't ask candidates to indulge a company's dysfunction.

No, your time doesn't become less value because you're unemployed, but you have more of it and more of an incentive to participate in the "inefficient three-ring circus" process.

> I think it's batsh!t insane that (apparently) so many people are so willing to go through this type of process, and to go through it n times until they land a job.

I think it's insane that some companies hire people after only a single cursory interview. In a startup, a new hire is one of your biggest expenses and has a tremendous impact on the company. Not to mention that you're probably going to spend more time with this person than with you're significant other. Plus, it's a lot harder to break up with an employee than with a girlfriend.

Even the typical "gauntlet" seems like too little to me. I'd rather spend several weeks working with someone before hiring them, but unfortunately that's not possible.

I'm going to have to agree with this. After dreading the impending interview process I would have to go through this fall, I can't imagine working for a company that doesn't have it.

For all the short comings of this process, I can say without a doubt that the quality of fellow interviewees I met at onsite interviews with the top companies was _significantly_ higher than those I met at companies with a shortened interview process. Sure that's likely obvious and anecdotal, but it gives me some peace of mind.

I don't get it. How does this square with the shortage of talent? In my field, there is an objective oversupply of candidates, and the standard interview process is still a 20 minute screener and 3-5!hour callback. You still get 30+ days to decide on an offer.

Two hypotheses:

1) credentials (degree, class rank, past work experience, etc) are seen as better indicators of future performance in law than in programming

2) less effort is put into training in programming so more effort must be put into screening

That makes a lot of sense.

Every tech job I've ever had was pretty much that. 20-30 minute phone screen, 3-5 hour onsite interview.

But then I've never worked in the Bay Area.

I've only ever experienced anything like what is described a few times. One was a job I wasn't interested in. Another I wasn't interested in working with the team/environment in question... and another still, was strung out so long, and then dropped so late in such a weird way, it pissed me off.

For the most part it's usually a phone call with a recruiter or HR type.. then a technical screen and/or an informal phone call.. followed by an in-person 1-2 hour interview. Usually half of the face to face interview is just chit-chatting.

At this point, I've been in three jobs since I last updated my resume.. which I should probably do eventually. I'm not sure how much it matters... I'm less concerned about what comes next, than finishing what I am working on now. I'm also up-front about my faults and in what ways I don't fit into a typical corporate culture.

> I don't get it. How does this square with the shortage of talent?

The stats are about software developers at large, but a company does not hire a developer at large - there's usually a very specific stack of technologies it uses, and once you've decided that yours is going to be, let's say, Node + Angular + Go, you're not exactly on the market for Java + Scala or Ruby + Rails guys even though you might get hundreds of their resumes.

A shortage of talent does not equal a shortage of applicants.

I did a lot of phone screening and in-person interviewing at Amazon and the experience was nothing short of shocking. Applicants with 5+ years of professional experience who couldn't solve Fizzbuzz or reverse a string. People who didn't know what a set was - I had one guy who claimed to have done a decade of GIS development state that "he never uses sets - he just uses maps for everything." I would not let the vast majority of them anywhere near a codebase that I even somewhat cared about.

The filters are there for a very good reason. I think once a candidate meet a certain bar, the the process becomes somewhat arbitrary, but most applicants I've seen - where by "most" I mean 95/100 phone screens - don't come anywhere NEAR that bar.

I don't see how anyone who already has a job can do that.

OK, you want me to do a full-day onsite interview? And you only hire 10% (or less) of the people you interview? That means that I'll pretty rapidly use up my annual vacation allotment on interviews.

Some people say that you're supposed to "disappear" for a couple hours in the middle of the day to interview. That's dishonest to your current employer. In an "open office" environment it's very hard to disappear without being noticed.

Taking a full day (or half day) for an interview doesn't scale for a candidate that already has a job.

Thoroughness of the interview process typically relates to the amount of skills required for the job. Engineering requires a tremendous amount of skills, and so it requires a fairly thorough review process. Being a cashier, for example, requires very little training. You could hire somebody after a 15min interview, and if they turn out to suck, fire them and move on with very little lost. That's not the case with an engineer.