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>> "Given that interviews effectively take up whole days"

Really? I find they are either an hour in the office or a few 30 minute phone calls. At least in tech. I know in other fields they have all day group interviews with lots of team building stuff but I haven't encountered that in tech (well at least with startups).

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Onsite interviews are consistently 4-6hr chunks at many places in the bay area.

Wow. What actually takes place in that time?

In my experience, I have had 3-6 hour long blocks with 1-3 members of the company, technical and non-technical. It typically starts with 5-10 minutes of chit-chat about my background and the company, then we do a technical exercise or a series of personality questions (for instance, explaining something technical to an employee in marketing to see if we could work together and if I could communicate across departments). After that, we wrap up with ~10 minutes of Q&A. Since it takes up so much time, it's important to get the phone screen right to not waste time on both sides. I have heard of companies that will have you pair program for a whole day instead of doing whiteboard questions.

I don't think I would do well in those sorts of interviews. I guess my experience is different because I've only interviewed remotely (remote interview, on site job). So they were typically 2-3 30 min Skype calls with different members of the company (CEO, CTO, Investor occasionally) and then I would send through code for them to look at or they would give me a small feature of their product to develop (1-2 days paid remote work) and review me based on that.

That kind of coding interview would be ideal too, but that takes more total time than 4-6 hours. It's 8-16 hours total vs 3-6 hours. When an engineer has a FT position already, they can't easily commit that much time as you can as a freelancer.

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