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Comment by unshavedyak | Hacker News Reader

> It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.

I think part of the reason is that interviews have gotten more adversarial as time has gone on. Ie less respect for the interviewee, more of a power dynamic, more careless wasted time in lazy take home assignments, etc.

I wouldn't mind 9 hour interviews to 3 companies if i knew i'd land the job. It's the 1,000 companies that many people experience that gives them pause after so much disrespect through time.

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"Job interviews" in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours. There weren't even quizzes to see if you really could program, let alone leetcode-grinding insanity.

Once a system gets gamed en masse, anti-gaming measures dominate, and ruin, the whole process. See also: ads vs. ad blockers, and the fact that you can't run a fucking email server of your own anymore without jumping through security hoops.

> "Job interviews" in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours. There weren't even quizzes to see if you really could program

How far back are you referring to? I'm definitely not the oldest person around here, but most of my interviews since graduating college were more than casual conversations.

The exceptions were primarily where I was coming in via a referral or they were hiring me for something that was already proven and verifiable, like open source contributions.

When I was coming up in the 90s what I found was it was mostly conversational, sometimes with some whiteboarding although of a much more relaxed nature than contemporary whiteboarding. It was more a tool to help express your thoughts and draw pictures than writing code.

There were some companies like Microsoft who were starting to become known for being more intense, but I never came across that.

It wasn't until the mid-aughts that I started to see brain teasers, "real" whiteboarding, and other aspects that started to bleed into standard interviews.

I'm to understand that Microsoft was one of the companies that had more relaxed interviews in the early 90s, and then took a turn for the more intensive in the mid-90s.

Perhaps the turning point was Jim McCarthy's "beware of a guy in a room", which he meant both figuratively and literally, leading to a transition away from solo or shared offices or even cubicles for software engineers and toward open-plan arrangements. I think that his wisdom led first Microsoft, then the rest of the industry, to treat software engineers not as the darling whiz kids they were in the past, but more a cohort to be closely watched and controlled, as the company is risking a lot on them.

my first job at a startup (first engineer after the founders) consisted of 13 hours on the phone with the CTO over a few weeks and then an in person all day interview that included traveling from Chicago to SF and a couple of dinners with the founders. this was 1996. our typical interviews after joining were all day affairs and they people almost all people that were referred in or had worked with in the past (I wasn't).

interviews at twitter back in 2010 were 6 hours and that was true even for me when we had an agreement to acquire my company pending the success of those interviews. at the time they had a lot of ex-googlers and they were setup similarly.

My first job in 2004 was a pretty casual conversation. My next few through the 00s were basically the same tbh.

> “Job interviews” in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours.

In 30 years of interviewing on both sides, as candidate and as hiring manager, I’ve never seen that myself. I don’t doubt it’s happened. I can’t speak to what’s normal everywhere. But I can say for sure that either a half day or full day of formal interviews (usually depending on both team and company size) has been absolutely standard in my experience, both in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, for decades.

On top of that, all of my jobs I’ve ever had, even when I was a shoe-in because I got the interviews via networking, they all involved multiple days worth of email and phone calls and resume prep and benefits negotiations, and (later in my career) sometimes legal negotiations like non-compete exclusions.

I’ve had lots of casual conversations during the process, but I’ve never been hired on a casual conversation alone, and never seen someone else hired that way.

I've worked as an employee, a contractor, and owned my own firm and hired. Seen all sides.

Until the last few years, the idea of hours and hours of interviews wasn't a thing. I interviewed at IBM and was hired after two, 1 hour interviews. One of those over the phone.

I can't even envision what these interviews are all for. It feels like people attempting over the top risk management, without really scoping the risk. It feels quite disorganized.

Well, bullshit actually. When I went to Sun in 1996, I was flown out for a full day of interviews (9 hours!) plus both lunch and dinner. (And this was true for more or less every company I interviewed with.)

I'm not sure why people are indexing so hard on the interviews, as we matriculate very few candidates into conversations; if you want to complain about something, complain about the written nature of our hiring process.[0]

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003

Thank you for caring about us.

in Sun's defense, that was in the 1990s, before the invention of the telephone.

Yes, I definitely had some full day interviews back then, including travel time.

The largest difference I have found between then and now is what the interview actually consists of, not how long they last.

What are the differences in what the interviews consist of?

btw congrats on the company. i was skeptical at the time but it was never because you wouldn't attract awesome talent and make great hires. your process looks great to me.

Thanks! And don't worry -- there were PLENTY of reasons for skepticism in 2019! We got lucky many times over, hitting on stuff that turned out to be really important in ways that we couldn't know at the time.

The hiring process is a very concrete example of that. What still blows my mind (at least a little) is that our process came directly out of one of the worst moments in my career: making an absolutely terrible hire about two years before we started Oxide. For a while after that, I wished I could go back and warn my previous self to not make the hire that would be so destructive to the organization -- but in the years at Oxide I have come to realize that that terrible hire was in fact essential for the future Oxide: it was the impetus for putting together a writing-intensive process, and there is no doubt in my mind that I had I not made this atrocious hire, I would have continued to hire the (broken) way that I had been hiring. (I described this a bit in my conversation with Gergely Orosz on hiring.[0])

Anyway: don't get me near the time machine -- I'll only screw things up.

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/hiring-proc...

>is that our process came directly out of one of the worst moments in my career: making an absolutely terrible hire ... that would be so destructive to the organization

What role was this hire filling? Are they publicly well known enough to name drop?

What an attrocious question.

Why is that an atrocious question?

Wish I could apply for Oxide. Been admiring from afar (physically)

I think people are just generally grousing about Interview length, not about your company specifically. Don't worry about it. It's not aimed directly at you.

I know in my case, it's not about you directly.

I firmly believe it's because someone getting fired, for poor performance, is a huge deal now.

Where I am, exposing someones poor performance is more of an exhibition in the failure of the hiring process and all involved. So, you just keep the under-performers around.

Could be.

My experience more closely matches yours, but I've also done the multiple rounds of painful interviews.

I do find that the latter can be explained by care and concern, and also by organization chaos and poor boundaries. It's hard to tell until you're in them, but I try to avoid the latter whenever I can.

As another commenter mentioned - I now respect companies that take their time in hiring. The last thing I want is to jump on with some company that will hire anyone. But there is an element of respect - if you're just duplicating questions and wasting my time? GTFO here.

IBM - well, that tells us all :) seriously though, you may be referencing the dot com era, when a warm body was all that sufficed

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