The interview process asks a LOT of the interviewee and then does not provide anything that could help the person improve next time, so the entire process feels like a complete waste of time. In my case, I was also disrespected by the recruiter.

The next time they reached out, I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me (which is frustrating when you have already passed these same steps before). I don't respond to Amazon recruiters anymore.

The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun.

But developers also really don’t like being surrounded by unqualified developers who slipped through a weak interview process. They also don’t like having significant numbers of their teammates fired and replaced all the time because the company had “hire fast, fire fast” interview styles. It’s miserable and slightly terrifying to work at a company where nobody really wants to invest much time into building relationships with new hires because many of them are going to be PIPed out before the year is over.

So while the interviews may not be fun, the reality is that strong developers really appreciate the outcome of such a rigorous process. It also helps protect people from becoming false negatives because they didn’t mesh with a single interviewer or struggled with a single interview problem.

So now we’re at this weird equilibrium where devs simultaneously hate the interview process for themselves but appreciate it being applied to everyone around they (even if it’s not immediately obvious).

And then on the flip side - if you are really a star, and you are interviewing at a small company you should want 5-7 interviews to gauge the caliber of people you will work with.

In my opinion this is a big problem. I wish there was a stronger culture of letting low performers go quickly in tech. This would reduce the need for exhaustive interview loops and ultimately make the industry more inclusive because you could afford to take a chance on someone without being chained to them for years to come.

I had to go through 8 interviews for a senior position at Facebook and ended up not getting the offer. I wasn't paid a dime and had to use a few vacation days at the job I had at the time in order to take the interviews. Technically I lost money interviewing at FB.

Since you have a chance of getting cut at each round as an interviewee you are left hoping not to run into: some esoteric corner of programming you could learn in 10 minutes but haven't seen before; an interviewer who always asks a pet question (even if told not to do this); a personal dislike that is illegal but not challenged (age, gender, race, etc., waved away as "a bad fit").

If multiple interviews were used only to strengthen assumptions about a candidate and each interview had a narrow intent, they COULD help companies avoid more bad hires. But after interview #3 you are probably just filtering reasonable or even exceptional candidates based on random chance.

On the other hand, this may be a fantastic method to strengthen a "hive mind" culture, but that doesn't sound like a worthy goal.

I can guarantee that you will never see me in one of your interviews. Would I be valuable to your company? Maybe, but we will never know because the process is too long.

On the other hand, I struggle with impostor syndrome. While fairly successful in my day-to-day, I will likely fail whiteboarding sorting algorithms etc. Imagining a series of five interviews stresses me out and I’m not even looking right now :)

What makes you think that the process provides an accurate representation of the skills needed for the day to day job? In my experience it simply tests whether the candidate has invested lot of time cramming for that very specific type of test. If I was running a small company I would much rather discuss a candidate's experience with them and leave them the time to build useful skills, not worthless ones for passing a test.

The best candidates can get jobs paying the same or more money with fewer interviews, so the very best aren’t going to pick you.

I've never been paid for interviewing. You mean you pay the successful candidates well, which is what? 10% of the people you subject to this obnoxious process?

Well, no you don't. You pay a lot of money only the people you hired.

I had more than one interview, where the things I discovered during the interview made me reconsider my options and go for another company. Not because I wouldn't have fit with the team or my skills were not there, but because this kind of thing tells me how processes are organized or not organized within your company, how people treat each other etc.

What candidates does a hiring process like this drive away? Are it specific character traits that pass through the sieve? If yes, how will that shape your corp and the culture in it in the long term?

I just want to highlight that this works specifically because there are a very finite number of these we pay you a lot of money companies competing for talent and that's the primary reason candidates put up with this [expletive deleted] treatment. And the result are beneficial for these companies, yes.

In a previous company we pair interviewed, 1/2 hour screen + 2 one hour slots. I liked that format a little bit better.

I've been interviewing people for about 40 years now, I was just reflecting on my first ever interview that I participated in when I was still a teenager.

I would say there are some factors that are not going to come out in any number of interviews. Conversely there are factors that are immediately noticeable.

I can tell in 10-15 minutes how strong someone is technically. At least I can tell the difference between "weak", "maybe", "strong" in 10 minutes.

Going back to my first ever interview. The guy was brilliant. He was technically good. He ended up being a not so good hire for reasons that would have been very hard to discover during the interview. It was partly the intersection of very smart without the experience to match and partly that he was just weird in some other ways. He was hired, he left within a year or so.

I think the science says the best predictor is an IQ test. The rest of our practices are not really evidence based. We tend to want to hire people that are like us, that know the things we know, we have all sorts of biases during the interview process, and throwing more people/time at it doesn't really seem to make a big difference.

I would say the most important thing you can do to get good people is to make your company a place that good people want to be. I.e. what matters is more what enters the pipeline then the interview process. I would bet that having 7 interviews vs. 3 has a difference that's completely in the noise and that at least there's no solid evidence that it gets you anything re: the quality of people working in a company. Every company says it has the best people. Mostly channeling Joel Spolsky here but I've seen this principle in action.

EDIT: Another random thought is that there are other factors that influence whether someone is going to be successful in a given role. Even the best software engineer can fail if the conditions for him to be successful aren't there.

How do you know it works?

> I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while.

There we are. It is all about you.

No need to say anything else - your life is all about you, so of course if it works for you, 'it works'.