Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

In the dark ages, I did coding and systems work for a large money center bank. Hiring back then was at most three interviews - a team member, manager and perhaps the next manager up. There were no "tests," though pertinent questions were asked - often related to the hardware/development environment and familiarity with business and process.

I don't recall any of the people that I worked with directly, or knew from other groups, being incompetent.

I see a lot of responses in here that try to justify the practice using empirical data/logic. What we’re failing to consider is the trade off between “efficiency” and “equitability.”

Just because something is 100% efficient in allocating resources (time, money), doesn’t mean that it’s worth doing. What this thread shows is that somehow, we’ve become sympathetic to megacorps, in winner take all markets, who want to build a world where their time and money is seen as the most valuable.

Instead, we should account for the fact that these companies, with CEOs making $200mm+ per year, should have a civic duty to take on more risk giving people a basic right- access to a job.

Credit card companies aren’t allowed to underwrite based on certain factors heavily correlated with race, religion, or other things (I forget the rest) that were deemed unfair to be judged by. In an efficient world, we would have collectively decided that companies should be able to infer your ability to repay debts based on the zip code you live in, or the college you went to, or the demographics of your friends. It makes sense to not allow this from an equitable standpoint. Why can’t the same be said about hiring people?

Who has the luxury of going through 4 interview rounds? Who has the privilege of studying hours and hours of leetcode? Who has the privilege of staying up to date on the latest web frameworks? I think you get my point.

What won’t surprise me is that the data may suggest the youngest are most suited for many jobs, if one were to judge by interview readiness and performance. If that becomes to norm, would the future version of yourself deem the mechanisms of finding a job market acceptable?

> - a few examples of extremely senior, extremely successful engineering leaders who stayed at or near the top of the game technically, and those are but a few examples from a very long list

But all of these are the exception, not the norm. You said you've been in a FAANG style org, so you've been able to view the org-chart. For every Jeff Dean or John Carmack, there's three-dozen directors and VPs who manage large orgs whose names you've never heard of and who haven't checked in code in half a decade. They're still usually very good managers.

(A reasonable opinion I've seen, btw is that if you're managing a team of say 5 or more people, if you have time to make regular code contributions,you probably aren't focusing enough on your other managerial responsibilities and are letting your reports down)

> - an observation that in other fields, law for example, they call in the highly-knowledgable, highly-expensive, person capable of solving problems few in anyone else in the organization can and that this person carries titles like "partner" and makes the most money.

This is pseudo-true. Partners are called partners not because they're capable of solving problems no one else can, but because they carry an ownership stake, and I'm not a lawyer (and presumably neither are you) but the impression I get is that law is far more delegatory than software, where a partner may call in some favors to address a problem, but will also have 20 Jr. associates investigate 20 different possible approaches and write 20 different briefs to then choose between.

> When I'm wearing my hacker hat I have no interest in reporting to an EM who couldn't do my job in a pinch,

Maybe we have different definitions here, but I've never, or perhaps once, had a manager who I felt could do my job in a pinch, and I was a new grad and he was the worst manager I've had at the time (although he very quickly got better as he learned to be more hands off). A manager who could do my job in a pinch is too micromanaging. Maybe you mean something different in that they could, given a week or two to turn-up on the project take over, but that's not really what I'd consider "in a pinch".

It may work well for hiring young people.

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.

That's probably true, but I think at least part of it is just smaller companies doing what bigger companies do, in a kind of cargo cult ritual.

The last company I worked at had 8 interviews, which I thought was a lot. My current company (about 100 people) had no less than 11 scheduled interviews!

Of those, only the first 2 were with people in my department — my manager first, then my manager and immediate coworkers. There was another group call with people in a related team I might conceivably be expected to liason with eventually. Fair enough.

The remaining 8 calls were with leadership in every other division in the company, most of which I would never work with. People with jobs where I don't even know what they do, and I'm sure they had no idea what I do. I just politely made conversation with them and answered their (very general) questions.

Now that I've worked there a while, I have never spoken with these people again, or worked in any way with the teams they oversee.

I've also participated in a few interviews at this company now, from the other end of the Zoom call, and I know how it works: literally every branch of the org chart gets a meeting for every interviewee, regardless of what they're applying for. Everyone has a chance to say "no", but in practice nobody outside the relevant teams is going to exercise that veto, because they are well aware that they are unqualified to judge the candidate's skills, and will never have to work with them anyway.

It's just a big waste of time for everyone involved.