I had the experience of going through 14 rounds of interviews (excluding the HR calls), where the manager and the team liked me. And then had a 15th interview with a “cross functional stakeholder” where the interviewer was super busy and couldn’t schedule an interview for a while, eventually scheduled a 30 min “conversation” where she asked domain specific business questions that you wouldn’t know answers to if you didn’t work in that company and then rejected me for not “getting the right signals”. Never mind the 15 approvals from the interviews prior and the fact that this was a generic software engineering role. This is a company that prior to the interviews said “we value everyone’s time, so if at any point we feel it is not a right fit, we’ll cut the interviews short, even if more are scheduled for the day”. They also apparently schedule the interviews in the increasing order of seniority of the interviewers because they want to ensure they save company time by cutting interviews short and not having the senior interviewers interview candidates that are not a great fit.
Hopefully they paid you for that time they wasted, though I doubt it.
Reminds me of interview code assignments. Sometimes they don’t even care if you solve any problem. Programming is sometimes not the point, and in those cases it comes down code vanity. It’s a test to determine if the interviewer can read the code, because they probably can’t, even with ample code comments and test coverage and formal documentation, and somehow that is the fault of the candidate with several hours wasted.
At any rate I have signals that I look for during the interview, that I learned while unemployed, and I try to drop out as early as possible if it smells childish.
I saw a post on X a few days ago from a hiring manager. She had recently filled a job posting for a senior engineer, and had received almost 650 applications. I asked her how many of them were juniors, and she said only about 120.
That's 500 senior engineers to compete with, and in this kind of market you're going to see more and more of these unfair hiring practices. If you need 10 interviews to assess a candidate, something is wrong with you.
You’re probably right. Though I’ve applied for 70+ jobs in the last 6 months with a carefully written resume/cv sans gpt, and I haven’t had so much as a screen. It’s a depressing time.
Thanks, a lot of these Tech Influencers on Twitter really like to post screenshots without giving source to the original link (and shamelessly promote their stuff once it goes viral)
Ten is definitely excessive. A phone screen and half-day panel is sufficient to make a call. If you're asking candidates to keep coming back for another round, that's a sign of a dysfunctional organization where no one wants to make decisions.
In my last position we spent our time trying to shorten and cut down the selection process as much as possible. One half hour phone call, one face to face interview for most roles.
Last October I decided to leave and hired my replacement as CTO. That process was more involved but, even then, only three stages: one online, two face to face.
You can really only indulge these ridiculously convoluted processes if you’re a famous company where many people want to work and will put up with your bullshit to achieve that end.
But, make no mistake, FAANG or not, this is not good hiring practice and is extremely disrespectful of interviewees’ time. Not to mention wasting a lot of your teams’ time on endless interviews.
Even if you did eventually receive an offer, the department has already proven to be extremely dysfunctional. If you were to accept such an offer, you will be a victim to such dysfunction there every day. If you are desperate, keep going, otherwise abort and never exceed five rounds.
Reminds me of interview code assignments. Sometimes they don’t even care if you solve any problem. Programming is sometimes not the point, and in those cases it comes down code vanity. It’s a test to determine if the interviewer can read the code, because they probably can’t, even with ample code comments and test coverage and formal documentation, and somehow that is the fault of the candidate with several hours wasted.
At any rate I have signals that I look for during the interview, that I learned while unemployed, and I try to drop out as early as possible if it smells childish.
I've only had one that I had to cut short recently, and I did.
I wasn't sure if I should or not. I can think of valid reasons why to do it and valid reasons not to.
That's 500 senior engineers to compete with, and in this kind of market you're going to see more and more of these unfair hiring practices. If you need 10 interviews to assess a candidate, something is wrong with you.
I wouldn't recommend that screwed up company to anyone :)
edit: oh and they tried multiple times to get me to move to any state they hired without any relocation money, lol.
Last October I decided to leave and hired my replacement as CTO. That process was more involved but, even then, only three stages: one online, two face to face.
You can really only indulge these ridiculously convoluted processes if you’re a famous company where many people want to work and will put up with your bullshit to achieve that end.
But, make no mistake, FAANG or not, this is not good hiring practice and is extremely disrespectful of interviewees’ time. Not to mention wasting a lot of your teams’ time on endless interviews.