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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It's over several days. This used to be a pretty normal thing in hiring processes!

That has never been a normal thing in hiring processes. Normal within Silicon Valley maybe, but normal overall in the US? Absolutely not.

Yes, it is normal, especially at the salary that we pay (currently $275K). To take but one domain: at that salary, you are (roughly) at the level of a school superintendent for a school district with thousands of students (like, large town/small city). If you have ever been associated with hiring someone in that kind of position, you will see a VERY time intensive process, with many hours of interviews with many stakeholders. So yes, we have an intensive process -- but we take hiring very seriously, and we believe that it shows in our extraordinary team.

Oh how I wish you guys would hire new grads. I got into kernel dev partly due to zfs and partly due to Redox OS. Well atleast I have worked with Redox now, hopefully someday with you guys too :)

I call BS. Google didn’t have that many hours of interviews for L5 and it’s TC and the TC is around 500k between cash and liquid RSUs.

The comparison to a superintendent is bunk because that’s a politically loaded position so the vetting is high because of that, not the comp.

None of the FAANG gang put up 9 hours of interviews and pay more than Oxide.

Just own it, your process is more time consuming and is NOT normal. But it’s what gives you an extraordinary team. FAANGs are filled with bad hires.

Its simple. Go to Google then. FAANG gang is decades older than Oxide and 3-4 order of magnitude higher revenue. They can hire hundreds of people a year who never do an hour of useful work in a year and still be fine. A startup can't do that.

Yes, my point is you can’t claim 9 hours of interviews in 3 3 hour tranches is standard.

Apple will happily put you through 8 rounds if interviews lol

Not default, not an hour each, and that’s still 1 short of the standard for oxide.

I don't understand how these arguments about normality are supposed to be persuasive when so many of us have had the experience of being required to travel to do interview cycles. Nine hours does not actually sound like all that much to me.

Travel time is not equivalent to interview time. I would rather travel 2 days for a 3 hour interview than have a 9 hour interview in my current city. Interviews are exhausting if they are thorough.

> Nine hours does not actually sound like all that much to me.

I think because of who you are you haven’t actually had to experience a regular tech interview in 10+ years.

That's directionally true but note that I'm not talking about current interview practice; I'm comparing claims about current norms to what they were before.

(Though: I actually did interview somewhere recently.)

I have had to fly and stay multiple days overnight in New York City, Minneapolis, and Atlanta for job interview processes in the past. This was absolutely the norm. What's not normal is a couple relatively brief online transactions (2-3 Zoom interviews, a work sample test) clinching a job. That's quite new.

If anything the hiring practices have gotten much shorter.

I’ve had the _Batesvilke Casket Company_ in _Batesville Indiana_ demand I come in for multi-day interviews.

Well that just makes sense. You can't be too careful hiring casketmakers.

To be fair, Batesvilles owners, until recently, were famous for innovation in caskets.

Not so much for short interview cycles.

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