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Aurornis • today at 3:50 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

The only time I see people blitzing interviews and stacking 5-10 different companies interview processes is when they’re unemployed urgently trying to change jobs. In those cases it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to stack interviews.

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.


Replies

john_strinlai • today at 4:01 PM

>In those cases it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to stack interviews.

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.

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serial_dev • today at 4:31 PM

And how about people who have a job that they just don’t like that much, and would love to escape.

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…