I’ve also done interviews that were brief 30-60 minute casual discussions followed by an offer during the hiring craziness that happened in a few years in the past. Anecdotally, coworkers at those companies were a completely random range from smart and kind down to the meanest, most clueless people I ever worked with. They had high turnover both because they were always firing bad hires (hire fast only works if you also fire fast) and people were burning out from the perpetual stream of bad hires being randomly injected into the company after they talked their way through the short interview.
Looking back, the interview processes that took the longest were certainly not perfect, but the companies that had them were much better about maintaining a coherent culture and high bar for the coworkers I would get. Every new hire felt like someone amazing who I was happy to be working with.
Everyone has different priorities, but looking back I think the relatively small amount of time I invested into long interview processes (relative to the 2000 hours I work every year) was time well spent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
The largest difference I have found between then and now is what the interview actually consists of, not how long they last.
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...
I know in my case, it's not about you directly.
3x 3 hours sounds -exhausting-.
> 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.
On the other hand I like meeting a lot of people that I’d be working with. It’s nice to start day 1 knowing who people are.
We also advance very few candidates to interviews and hire a surprisingly large proportion of those who interview, so it's not like you're doing all this interviewing for the usual slim chance of being hired. The written materials are the primary filter.
Hiring process RFD: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003
It genuinely took me another year to even consider applying to another job it was so demoralizing.
They told me I could re-apply in six months and encouraged me (seemingly genuinely) to re-apply for their capricious activity, I just laughed in their face.
In my experience with this format it isn't like you are coding for 9 hours. It starts with soft HR stuff, ends with a sales pitch to you, and most of the middle is just pleasant conversation with interesting people.
Right, but you're not just doing it with them, you're potentially doing it with lots of companies you're applying to. It would be untenable to devote that much time to every prospect. Oxide can only do it because most other companies don't.
There are lots of axes on which to judge a company so I wouldn't write off Oxide for this alone, but it doesn't speak well of their respect for their candidates' time.
If you consistently fail (or give up) at the very last interview, there's something rather wrong.
Your median/average should be better.
They don’t have every candidate scheduled for the entire time of all the rounds. If you don’t pass earlier rounds, they’re not going to waste time (yours and theirs) hauling you through more rounds of interviews.
If you make it to the end of all of those scheduled interviews, there’s probably a very good chance you’re getting an offer.
9 hours just seems excessive. Other companies have "funnel" hiring processes like this and still manage to do it in 3 hours instead of 9.
> You do know
No, I did not know when I posted that comment. steveklabnik's comment was posted concurrently with mine, and I did not feel the need to scour the whole thread in case there happened to be an answer to this specific question from an Oxide employee. But thank you for the data point.
My blocker has been the initial written answers to the questions. I've had the questions half-answered for nearly a year now. I want to do it properly (sans AI) but other things come up and I question the EV of spending the time, especially since I'm not a strong writer in the first place※.
For Oxide, it makes sense to demand a strong writer due to their culture, so even if technically qualified I might not be a good fit, assuming I even get an interview.
※ - I write unambiguously, but use point form whenever possible and am not great at naturally writing concisely.
As for the materials, they play a part in the conversation stage, and even if you get hired and interview others hoping to join. Every interviewer reads the materials of the candidate, and we send the interviewer's original materials to the candidate. It's not nearly as tedious as some of these comments are making it out to be (and believe me, I've been through the "ten elevator pitches" gauntlet in my career).
tbh, I really enjoyed filling out my Oxide materials. They got me thinking and taking stock of my wins and motivations, not just the crap we throw on resumes to attract the eye.
Well, they're being paid to do that. That's part of the unfairness. The other part is the time is bounded on the employer side. On the prospective employee side, it's unbounded - you're interviewing until you get a job somewhere.
I did an interview process that was 6 hours, one hour per week, then flew me in for a 6 hour on-site. They decided not to take me at that point and provided no reason.
Hiring is the most important thing you are doing in a company. Always has been. From my experience it's also highly dependent on how big the org is and how structured it is. No two hiring processes are alike. Common theme I've picked up when hiring people is first and foremost to do a 'vibe check' convo through which both you and the applicant get to know a bit each other, ambitions, learn about the role and do a q&a. If you have experience with this, and you know your team(s), you will easily pick up if the person fits the bill. That usually takes around an hour to two _at most_. Second part is then for the person to talk to the team itself, the team lead. Over time, I found it's best to do a live exercise of either walking through something or doing something (not leet code, just something representative as a mental exercise) while chit chatting about it which is also a covert vibe check. If that passes, third convo is back to the same person initially talked to to strike a deal (which was foreshadowed with terms on the first talk). All in all 3-4 hours total after years of pruning.
Personally - vibe check, vibe check, vibe check. Never let HR do the talk, let HR funnel candidates for a shopping list.. or in this case it seems to be essays that do that.
Suppose you get interviews on 10% of those. That’s 10 interview pipelines, and if every company had this policy, 90 unpaid interviewing hours.
Like the comment elsewhere in this thread, candidates will find other roles before your interview gauntlet concludes.
Spotted your first problem. Don't shotgun apply to anyone and everyone. You should only be applying to jobs you actually want.
I've always preferred this kind of targeted application -- I've applied to 5 jobs total in my ~15 year career and gotten 4 offers, two of which I accepted. Everyone has their own objectives they optimize for -- personally, I care most about building monuments of lasting value.
When a company says they have 9 hours of interview time, that’s usually the maximum time if you make it through all the rounds. If you get that far, you’re highly likely to get an offer.
You would also be surprised at how many people will actually do 10-20 long interview rounds to try to maximize their chances for the best job.
There are almost two different bubbles of candidates: Those who refuse to do anything more than a couple quick calls, and those who will rearrange their life to spend days putting in work for each job they want. I think that’s fine and everyone should do what works for them, but if you think 9 hours of interviewing is going to turn candidates away from a company like Oxide you’d be very surprised to see the quantity and caliber of applicants who line up for jobs like this.
I think you also might need to adjust your expectations now that AI interview cheating is getting out of control. A lot of companies are moving back to on-site interviews. I’d happily do 3 x 3 hour video calls more than flying and staying at hotels and renting cars to get to an office in another city just to interview.
I'm on the market right now due to a layoff and I have an agent that reviews linkedin every morning and cross references levels.fyi for role leveling and salary and then assess fit to my resume. I get around 5-10 _possible_ positions per day and with human judgement that's usually down to 0-2, averaging about 0.5 per day.
I hear back from probably close to 10% but that's with a highly targeted approach, not just spamming my resume everywhere. And my pipeline is freaking full. It's a full time job doing prep and participating in all the interviews.
The only interview so far that's been a huge time sink has been anthropic's. But that's because I chose it. Their take home I have the option to use between 2 and 8 hours and I used the full 8 hours because I'm highly motivated and the position is well fit to my career history.
If X and Y are large enough sure. Most of the time X is hidden and Y is hard to gauge.
Oxide can obviously impose a 9 hour interview process because they're a good enough company that lots of smart, motivated people want to work there and thus good candidates are willing to endure that process. Lesser companies obviously can't impose that process because there aren't enough good candidates willing to endure it.
My main point being, different strokes for different folks. If you think that process is too long, great, find a company with a less time consuming process. But Oxide's process obviously seems to work well for them, so I think it's pointless to complain about it (note I don't really think that's what you are doing, but a bunch of reply comments certainly are).