[bluesroo]

If you're not employed and you want the best comp you can get, you should treat it as a full time job. My last job hunt was probably ~40-50 hours a week for a month between wrangling recruiters, hiring managers, and the interviews themselves... But I was absolutely haggard by the end of it and made sure that the hiring managers knew early that I'd need a few weeks between when I accept my offer and when I could begin.

I had direct contact with 31 companies. Of those, 16 made it past the recruiter+tech screens. We're about 2 weeks into the job hunt and at that point I needed to start pruning. I had frank conversations with the hiring managers and recruiters about comp, work/life balance, and how tight scheduling would need to be for the following interviews. This narrowed it down to ~8 companies. I also told them all they'd need to wait for ~2 weeks so that I could finish up all of my on-sites before I'd accept or reject their offers.

I scheduled on-sites over the following 2 weeks. Because all of the hiring managers and recruiters knew I was in 8 on-sites, they all tried to give me quick and good first offers hoping that I'd take it and drop my following interviews. A few tried to pressure me into a 2 day decision window (surprise, these offers were the lowest by far).

Of the 8, I received 6 offers. I failed the Google on-site and I turned down another company because of work/life stuff that came up during the interview. As offers came in I could decline ones that were clearly too low. The very last company that I interviewed with had the best offer, so I was pretty happy that I stuck it out... But the only time I was more exhausted was when we had a newborn in the house.

Depending on how you count "interview", these was easily in excess of 40. Each on-site was 3-6 interviews back to back.