Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

[geeky4qwerty]

edit: I love this community! Thank you so much for all the insight. For those who complained, I'm sorry if this post comes across as complainy or redundant, I respect the HN hive-mind and was genuinely curious about everyone's thoughts on the matter.

Hello fellow travelers, I'll do my best to keep this brief(ish).

I've been in IT professionally since Y2K, data entry->QA->SysAdmin->PM->consultant->founder->sold and with the money took some years off, bought some property and a fixer upper and went to school and got a BSBA degree (never graduated from high school but wanted to show my kids the importance of a degree). I missed working and creating things with people so decided to reenter the job market in the PM space. So now that my hat is in the ring I have been told by recruiters what I need to "expect" in this "new market."

I was told "5 to 7 interviews is normal". What? I genuinely feel like I'm having a 'Blast from the Past' moment in this whole thing (good 90s romcom kids, look it up).

When did a hiring manager lose their authority and the trust of the organization to do their job? Am I just out of touch? How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive? Am i missing something? HN, please help!

[mabbo]

Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain some of the logic behind it. I'm not saying this logic is valid, but it's how we got here, imho.

First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager, so they also need to interview you too and have a say.

Second: Is it really fair to have just one or two developers evaluate you? When I first was an interviewer, I liked everybody! I would have hired them all. So getting multiple data points matters. Best to have at least a couple dev interviews.

Then there's the whole problem of needing to evaluate you on multiple dimensions. Can one interview really tell if you're good problem solving, coding, algorithms/data structures, and any specialization the role has? What about the soft skills aspect? We're going to need to have at least 3 or 4 interviews to cover all these aspects. These roles pay a huge sum of money, so there's a lot of worry that someone will be hired who doesn't really meet the bar, you know?

But now we have a bigger problem: if we're going to invest 4+ people to spend an hour of time with you each, we'd better have some data points that you're worth that investment. So maybe we need one or two initial interviews ahead of time to weed out any obviously unlikely candidates.

After that, it's every other company going "Oh shit, Amazon does 6 interviews? We should do that too!".

[kstenerud]

Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media. Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz? "Culture fit"?

Tech companies have the lowest infrastructure costs of any industry, and so they have no place to hang their risk aversive paranoia except on personnel (the safer you are, the more trivial the things you fear).

There's nothing logical about it, but since they have to fear something, it'll be whatever some douchebag with a following puts in their next "XYZ considered harmful" blog post.

[grapeskin]

All we need is a “3+ interviews considered harmful” post to hit HN a few months in a row and we can finally solve this problem.

That, or we’ll have some representative from the big 5 saying “Hey guys, Jayden from (x soulless Silicon Valley company) here. Not speaking on behalf of my employer but actually at X Corp(tm) we’ve found that anything less than 37 interviews (+tip) isn’t enough to let the real stars shine through. We’re all about finding the true team players who are a good culture fit” within 2 minutes of the post going up.

[greggman3]

Is FizzBuzz cargo cult? I had my own company in 1995. We tried to hire programmers. The candidate would come in and we'd spend an hour interviewing. 9 out of 10 could not program at all and effectively wasted our time.

So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them. This way, less of our time was wasted. That test included an extremely small task like FizzBuzz. If you can't answer it you can't program, period! It filtered out the 9 out of 10 applicants who should never have applied in the first place and saved us a bunch of time.

At a big company the phone screen is supposed to do that but phone screens still take a hour or more of some engineer's time.

[tomc1985]

It pains me so much that we've gone from hiring a couple of supersmart ubernerds over a cool demo and setting them loose to... this.

Now, everything sucks. People who only know the tech they trained for. Tools are written for idiots, and the only thing even more written for idiots than that is the code we're supposed to be producing. Teams believing whatever stupid fad some trendy consultant prepared for them. Way too much support staff when I used to be able to call the stakeholder up directly and square any issues, now I have to go through like 4 idiot nontechnical PMs.

One of my previous managers compared us to a basketball team. Ew ew ew ew ew ew EW!

Tech sucks now. Get the business and nontechnical people out! All they contribute is bloat and mediocrity. The only people who should be in charge are those that have been at this for life.

[angarg12]

Why do people simply assume big tech companies are dumb and they haven't thought their hiring process through?

Amazon literally has a research team focused in hiring, and they run A/B experiments to continually improve the process. The current interview format is not a cargo cult, is a high refine process through the years.

Is it perfect? hell no, but it isn't the mindless copycat people make it to be. They have actual data to back up what works and what doesn't, although it might take several years to happen (like when Google finally dropped brain teasers).

[orzig]

If you can't calculate the optimal design (for hiring, in this case) from first principles, what option do you have but empirical observation? And when steady-state performance takes at least 2 years to obtain, is it unreasonable to have fads at roughly that frequency?

Resumes suck, take-homes suck, interviews suck, nepotism sucks; yet people still need to invest $x00,000 based on something. I don't have the answer, but let's not pretend it's not a hard question.

[mistrial9]

I just noticed a research paper called "A Silicon Valley love triangle: Hiring algorithms, pseudo-science, and the quest for auditability" Feb 2022 Mona Sloane,Emanuel Moss,Rumman Chowdhury

[geeky4qwerty]

This is incredibly insightful, thank you.

[vikingcaffiene]

Hiring manager here. IMO the current tech hiring norms are gross and not sustainable. It feels like a weird hazing ritual and with the current market, is the single biggest reason you can't hire. Why on earth would someone burn a weekend on a take-home test for your startup when they have 15 other irons in the fire? At my current employer we got rid of all that ridiculousness. No take home test. No live coding. We've gotten the whole process down to a few hours over a few days. I'd like to think it's a mutually respectful process.

I think it's time we accept that the person we are talking to is who they say they are on their resume. You don't see accountants balancing books before they get hired. Why should this be any different? If you aren't who you say you are, its either blatantly obvious in the interview or we'll find out when you join and we'll try to correct or part ways. This is like pretty much any other job out there.

[monster_group]

Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. It has been like that for at least 7-8 years (probably more) but I just found out that not all companies are like that. After being subjected to these demeaning Leetcoding interviews I went through a refreshingly pleasant experience. It was an interview with just one person. They gave me a technical open-ended problem and two weeks time. After two weeks I had to do a presentation to them how I would solve that problem. Not much more was required. I could choose to do as little or as much as I'd like. I did have to spend around 30 hours researching that problem as it was an unfamiliar problem space for me. The presentation was just 1 hour session with the hiring manager where he and I had a technical discussion about my solution. No more interviews of any kind (not even behavioral). I had an offer three days later. I thanked the manager for his meaningful and humane interview process. I can't believe I have wasted hundreds of hours doing LeetCode when there are companies out there that treat candidates respectfully rather than code churning machines.

[rafiki6]

Too many people got into this industry, and too many people were able to easily switch between companies and boost their salaries absurd amounts. The big boys decided to use interview grinds to reduce turnover (that's why they all more or less have the same process) and all the people who started companies and came from these companies have been through and assume this process works due to the success of the big boys and they themselves being subjected to it.

The reality is this profession isn't that hard, and majority of people working in it are pretty much just plumbers using the innovations of true computer scientists.

We've managed to created a much more inefficient gatekeeping mechanism than just creating a proper certification process and commended ourselves for it and pretend it's somehow more meritocratic than just getting a comp sci/eng degree and license.

[ergonaught]

I've built international teams, technical and otherwise, for 20 years and the reality is that unless you are hiring for an extremely specific role with extremely specific requirements, which is almost never the case in reality, any more than 3 interviews is a waste of time. Two within the same team, if relevant, one outside the team.

Furthermore, evaluating anything other than "Do you want to work with this person?" (on a scale of "I'll quit if you hire them" to "I'll quit if you don't hire them") is a waste of time.

But, as you see, people absolutely adore wasting their time and yours, as if no one has anything better to do.

Hire people that your people want to work with. Put them to work and see how it goes. Let go of people that didn't work out. There is no further secret sauce for hiring in nearly every ordinary circumstance.

IMO.

[bjornlouser]

They are trying to find candidates that won't quit once subjected to micromanagement and a culture of constant fire drills, etc.

A proxy for that kind of tolerance is whether the candidate will jump through an inordinate number of hoops while being hazed by future coworkers.

[geeky4qwerty]

seems extremely plausible, for sure.

[nickjj]

I'm not sure why part time contract style "interviews" aren't more common.

If I ever got into a situation where I was hiring, it would start with a 2 hour conversation. No coding questions. I want to get to know you and also talk shop about applicable technologies.

Then after that is simple. I would hire you to do 5-30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. The interviewer would do the driving to eliminate large amounts of ramp up time. This could be anything from R&D to implementing something real that'll ship to production. This would be paid work of course and the schedule would be based on the interviewee's availability, hopefully at least a few hours a day. The duration depends on how well of a match they are, a better match would have more hours just to filter things over a longer sample size.

The person pairing with them (a currently employed dev / tech lead / CTO, etc.) would be doing this work anyways so it's not a time sink, as opposed to them stopping their "real" work to do 5 technical interviews.

I'm guessing this would give both a good assessment of how the interviewee thinks through problems and you can get a good sense of where they're at technically. Also you get to see how well you mesh together from a "do I want to work with this person every day?" standpoint. It's also super low risk for the company because you don't need to go through the entire costly hiring process up front. It also lets the person interviewing for the job get a better sense of what it'll be like to really work there.

It's a win / win. Why isn't this more popular?

[autarch]

> I would hire you to do 30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things.

You say this as if most (or any) candidates could do this.

If you currently have a job, then you almost certainly won't have time for this, unless you're single with no hobbies. If you do have time, you may not be allowed to moonlight under your current employment contract.

And if you don't have a job, you _still_ may not have the time or desire to do this!

I'm currently jobless (by choice - I wanted a break) and I started interviewing a few weeks ago. It's exhausting! Even if I could squeeze in 30 hours of work over a couple of weeks, I wouldn't want to. I had 11.5 hours of interviews this past week, and now you want me to spend another 10-15 hours pair programming with you? Absolutely not.

If you spread those hours out over many weeks (6 weeks at 5 hours per week) the candidate will be done with the process everywhere else much sooner and they'll just accept an offer before this process finishes.

If you want a trial period, make an offer and have a 3-month probation period during which you will give the new hire regular feedback (at least once a month but more often is better). Doesn't every company do this already, at least implicitly?

[whimsicalism]

This comes up routinely. The answer that continues to be true is that if you want to hire talented developers, nobody would agree to this process.

You have to understand that, as an employer in the current market, you do not really hold any of the cards if you want to hire talented developers.

It's not a win/win. Nobody with options is going to accept multiple weeks of limbo in exchange for maybe having a job.

[wrs]

Most interviewees already have a full time job, and your existing employees don’t want to spend their evening hours pair programming with a candidate. So this doesn’t scale at all.

However, this is exactly what I did to hire the first few employees of my startup, because those initial hires are really critical. I was willing to limit my choices and take more time in order to avoid false positives. Also, that was ten years ago in a somewhat less crazy job market.

[monster_group]

The problem with this approach is that any real task requires a lot of internal knowledge (functional and technical) of the system which an outside candidate will not have. The pairing employee will have lots of it though and it is likely the candidate will appear inadequate even if the employee is aware of the internal knowledge difference. It is not straightforward to be productive on an alien code base from the get go.

[greggman3]

In 2012 a Google recruiter told me the got 1 million applications a year. I'm guessing that number is higher in 2022 and it's similar for other similar companies. You can't give 1 million applicants 5-30 hours of contract work. You still need some process to select a few of them. What would that process be?

[prewett]

It might be low risk for the company, but it’s not low risk for anyone who already has a job that they want to keep until they find a new one. You can’t take a week of vacation for a bunch of companies.

It would work for people without a job or contractors, but in the latter case, they probably are looking for contract work not W2 employment, so you’d be better off with contract-to-hire.

[riffraff]

because people don't have time to do a job and a half, so you'll be selecting for people with copious free time or will to spend the few they have working for you.

Works great for students or people unemployed or just graduated, not so much for older people with e.g. a family.

[in_cahoots]

Most people with jobs probably can’t devote 5-30 hours to contract work during the workday. Plus most employment contracts won’t allow this kind of side gig.

[NaturalPhallacy]

>Then after that is simple. I would hire you to do 5-30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things.

So they have to be unemployed while interviewing with you? Companies these day seem to be completely oblivious to the candidate already having a job but it's usually the case.

Other than that it doesn't sound bad, but it's kind of a big problem.

[nopenopenopeno]

Not a chance. I don’t want to be a freelance interviewer and this sounds exhausting. I need a job and to move on with my life.

[VirusNewbie]

Its a good idea but the thing about big orgs is you aren’t paying the big bucks for 99% of the labor, you’re paying because the one day the developer has to make a decision that does impact something at scale or in the hot path they don’t fuck up.

The differentiation between good and great doesn’t come into play on the average workday.

[paxys]

Are you going to pay me $250/hr for that time? If not, why would I spend 30 hours of my life vying for a chance for a full time job with your company? And what about my current job?

[Tao331]

Turn the table. How would you feel about your employees doing work for someone else on the side? I know some people are cool with their employees moonlighting, but I'm pretty sure it's still a minority.

[Fordec]

People have jobs and lives. The only people this gets are unemployed and self employed people who have nothing to lose or the time to spare. This strategy poaches nobody of worth with an ounce of self respect.

[marssaxman]

In addition to the obstacles others have mentioned, accounting for contract work creates extra nuisance at tax time. A tiny gig like you describe sounds like a lot of hassle for not a lot of money.

[tbihl]

You're describing an internship, but one where (a) the intern gets that much attention than normal, and (b) someone experienced is doing an internship.

[jjmorrison]

Well I can say in my experience firing people is such a pain nowadays that I feel a need to be a lot more careful in hiring. I've seen a bit more than half of fired employees come back with some form of discrimination lawsuit threat after being fired.

[Mountain_Skies]

Tech companies are extremely risk adverse when it comes to hiring the "wrong" person. More interviews means more people to spread to blame over if a wrong hire happens. At seven interviews, if everyone signed off on the bad hire, that wasn't anyone's fault, it must have been that the hire was skilled at deception or some other deflection.

[neilv]

As a principal-ish software engineer, I'd be more than happy to do 7 effective interviews/meetings with a promising prospective employer.

Every career move is life-changing, and I want to get as good a sense as I can about the people, environment, and company.

I want to hear from different levels and facets of the company, get a feel for the team members or representative other boots-on-the-ground ICs (what they're like, what the environment is like, how they feel about the company), and also try to see their initial impressions of how I'd fit in.

What doesn't work for that is being on the receiving end of a barrage of "whiteboard this Stanford new-grad shibboleth 'so I can see how you think'".

The current Leetcode interview tells me only a little bit about the company -- and it's negative (but, relativism-wise, I don't fault people much for defaulting to currently popular ideas). But it doesn't tell me much more than that (unless the interviewer is also being rude as they go through the ritual, which would be another negative).

The Leetcode interview also isn't a very effective way for the company to get a sense of what I can do that a second-year CS student probably can't.

[rdiddly]

The last two places that offered me jobs interviewed me twice each. The one before that, it was a fairly easy half-hour solo technical test, then an interview. I think that's the sweet spot, frankly - a fizzbuzz-level coding challenge and then a single interview to which all stakeholders show up. Maybe two interviews at most, and that's only if you can't get everybody in a room together at the same time. And when I say "all stakeholders," I really mean no more than about 4 people: a peer, a mentor, a boss, and at most one counterpart from another team that interfaces closely with that team, but I digress.

I've never had to put up with more than 2 interviews, and probably wouldn't. But I'm not in the Valley, and I'm generally not applying to the Big Five as it were. You know it occurs to me there's a possibility your recruiter is just over-preparing every candidate to expect the worst. Or who knows, maybe 5 to 7 interviews is normal for clients of that particular recruiter, because they've got a reputation for shoveling idiots through the door? In other words, it seems like there could theoretically exist a recruiter whose clients take their recommendations so seriously that they don't even interview you once!

[Ozzie_osman]

As someone who's played all roles in this story (candidate, interviewer, hiring manager, person designing the process) I'm going to argue that symmetry is more important than length.

By symmetry, I mean that at any point in the process, you and the company have invested the same amount and learned the same amount. If you're going to give me 5 interviews where I'm answering 90% or 100% of the questions, go away. If you're going to give me 5 interviews, where the first one is the hiring manager mostly telling me about the company and the role, the middle two or three are about 75% me answering, and the last one or two are mostly me getting to know some people I'm going to work with, that does seem long, but at least it's balanced. This is a big decision for the candidate as well, so presumably if the process is fair both the candidate and the company should want a process of the same length

[ChrisMarshallNY]

My God, I am so glad to be out of the rat race.

I was chased out, by the very first contacts from companies, or, in a couple of cases, the second contact, being directly hostile and insulting.

I’d assumed that this was because I’m older, and people just wanted me to self-delete from the hiring process (it worked). However, hearing all these nightmare stories makes me think that everyone has to go through that.

If that’s the case, then it’s really just a hazing ritual; preparation for new hires to be pliant and subservient.

[jclulow]

The predictive power of a single interview with a single person is just not that high.

For one thing, the company is not the only one doing the interviewing; the candidate is also interviewing the company. Before making a commitment to join a team, I think it's valuable to speak to a number of members of that team to get a sense of what they're like.

On the company side, I have also witnessed several people who might have looked alright in just one interview, but when exposed to several it became clear they were adjusting their story significantly for each interviewer to the point of dishonesty.

There is clearly some line beyond which more interviews would present seriously diminished returns, but I think six or seven interviews, each 30-60 minutes, is much more likely to result in a better outcome for a professional engineering position than just one interview with a hiring manager.

[ipaddr]

With people leaving in 2 years or 1 year at Amazon on average do you really need to talk to employees? Take a chance and make the best of it.

[NikolaNovak]

I love reading Hacker News for many reasons, but one of them is to see just HOW different "Silicon Valley/FAANG" mentality is from virtually everywhere else. Where 7 interviews and a full day on-site are seen as normal, productive, and fair to all involved.

FWIW, Where I'm at:

* Right now it's employee's market. I am pushing to have two short interviews with candidates, recruiting is pushing to minimize it to ONE. Otherwise we lose the candidates we most want to get - the highly qualified, ambitious ones who don't have time to waste and have opportunities and options

* We hire to keep. We are not hiring for somebody to do boilerplate for 12 months, stack their resume, and keep going. We are hiring to invest into them - ensure they learn about the business, the functionality, the processes, the system, the stakeholders, the clients, the team members; and perform well and smoothly and for a long time. As such, we find that technical skillset is important, but some of the non-technical skillsets much more so - sense of ownership and commitment, communication and soft skills, etc. So the 3 or 6 or 12 hours of coding problems really don't meet our needs.

I thought Google after a decade basically said - data doesn't support some of these crazy interviewing styles we have become known for. Did industry miss/ignore the data and decided to double down on making interviews more and more onerous, and more and more filtering out brilliant candidates who don't happen to be able to dedicate days of their lives (or weeks, for the inane interviews which require you to re-memorize your ComSci undergrad) PER OPPORTUNITY which may never hash out?

[nicoburns]

> "5 to 7 interviews is normal"

Yeah, it's definitely not. I've never done more than 3 interviews, and that was the exceptional case. Vast majority have been either one interview with the hiring manager or two interviews where one is with the immediate hiring manager and the other was with someone more senior within the company.

[vsareto]

>I was told "5 to 7 interviews is normal"

Be suspicious when anyone says something is normal in tech that tries to speak about the operations and culture of a vast array of companies, especially recruiters and very especially recruiters who work for recruiting companies.

Tech is a massive industry, and there's enough companies that don't do the normal thing that you can spend only a year at those companies and still have enough companies to remain employed for a lifetime. That's only 45 companies from age 20 to 65 if you only ever work a year at a single company.

That said, 5-7 seems exceptionally high. I've only ever done a max of 4, personally.

[daviddever23box]

It hasn't, and isn't.

IMHO, if a company cannot execute a hire in three interviews (or generally less), there are serious structural issues that one should steer clear of.

That said - the applicant screening process is where the most significant work-multiplication value lies; to this end, I cannot stress the significance of writing and communications skills with regard to the quality of a CV / resume. If the execution in this area is poor, it will be poor elsewhere. This is one's pitch deck, of sorts.

Frankly, there is a more critical question IMHO than (the existence or quality of) one's university degree or developer skill set: can a prospective hire with relevant experience and a history of execution be put in front of clients, co-workers and investors to communicate concisely and clearly?

Answer: they can certainly start with selling themselves during the interview process.

With the right hire, it can then be possible that requirements gathering is better defined, technical documentation is accurate, and work sizing becomes an exercise in clear communication of risk. It also makes culture fit a much simpler proposition.

[icedchai]

This correlates well to my personal experience. The companies with the longest interview processes have been the worst to actually work for: 8+ hour interview processes, 5 or 6 individual interviews, HR "behavioral" interviewing, on and on. The longer the process, the more dysfunctional the organization, the worse the actual job.

[whywhywhywhy]

> How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive?

Because hiring the wrong person becomes a colossal waste of time and money.

[csa]

As mentioned above, does 5 or 7 produce a significantly better result than 3 (or 2 or 1)?

I’m guessing not.

Two or maybe three interviews should be adequate for most positions.

I think the reality is that most people are pretty bad at selection, no one wants to shoulder the blame when things go sideways, so the solution is just to create a system where everyone (and therefore no one) is to blame. In reality, this creates an environment that is default No instead of default Yes. Whether that’s good or not for a specific company at a specific instant of time is really something only they can decide.

Fwiw, pro-tip, eliciting work samples that are close to the actual job are the best predictors of success. This may create some burden on the hiring org to create a good process, but it reaps huge dividends.

[gcheong]

That’s the standard excuse but how much less of a chance do you really think there is to hire the wrong person after 7 interviews vs say 3 or even 1 done well vs the time you’re spending trying to reduce that risk? More opinions isn’t always better. You can’t eliminate risk entirely and I don’t think it’s as as much of a waste as companies often claim it is.

[ipaddr]

That's only because you spent thousands having candidates go through 7 interviews.

[Apreche]

If the hiring process is faster, then the time wasted bringing in the wrong person is decreased significantly.