>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.

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…

I agree with this. Also I empathize with the trauma a lot of tech people are going through in the current market because of my experiences in the 'chip downturn', 'dot com downturn' and the 'economic downturn in the late naughts'. So I'm seeing a lot of 'maxing' like this; "I send out 10,000 resumes and maybe get 1,000 people interested, and 100 people willing to interview me, and this takes 9 months and I've only got a few more months of 401k I can eat up ... ahhhhhhhh!" My experiences going through these sources of downturns changed me a lot, I don't see how it couldn't have.

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.

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

> "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.

For many places it's unspoken but true, it's about breaking you down and making you reframe your experience, either you constantly excuse the behavior or you'll not fit in with their weird toxic positivity.

They told me I could re-apply in six months and encouraged me (seemingly genuinely) to re-apply for their capricious activity, I just laughed in their face.

If most companies take that much time before giving you a rejection or not, then job hunting would require quitting your current job to make sufficient time for it. With ten companies you’d need to organize something like 3-4 weeks of vacation.

I understand that, but it's still possible to devote up to 9 hours to this and get nothing in return. And maybe not just possible, but likely. We don't know how eagerly their pipeline rejects candidates. Every candidate has to take that gamble.

9 hours just seems excessive. Other companies have "funnel" hiring processes like this and still manage to do it in 3 hours instead of 9.

Most employers view employed candidates are much more valuable compared to unemployed candidates. However, Oxide isn't "most employers".

> Many people are applying to nearly 100 roles a month.

Spotted your first problem. Don't shotgun apply to anyone and everyone. You should only be applying to jobs you actually want.

That’s not how it works. Interviews are like a funnel. If you don’t pass the first interview they don’t schedule you for all of the other hours just to keep going. You get dropped from the pipeline.

When a company says they have 9 hours of interview time, that’s usually the maximum time if you make it through all the rounds. If you get that far, you’re highly likely to get an offer.

You would also be surprised at how many people will actually do 10-20 long interview rounds to try to maximize their chances for the best job.

There are almost two different bubbles of candidates: Those who refuse to do anything more than a couple quick calls, and those who will rearrange their life to spend days putting in work for each job they want. I think that’s fine and everyone should do what works for them, but if you think 9 hours of interviewing is going to turn candidates away from a company like Oxide you’d be very surprised to see the quantity and caliber of applicants who line up for jobs like this.

I think you also might need to adjust your expectations now that AI interview cheating is getting out of control. A lot of companies are moving back to on-site interviews. I’d happily do 3 x 3 hour video calls more than flying and staying at hotels and renting cars to get to an office in another city just to interview.

A hundred roles a month and call backs on 10% of them? That's A) and insane number of applications and B) a really high call back rate.

I'm on the market right now due to a layoff and I have an agent that reviews linkedin every morning and cross references levels.fyi for role leveling and salary and then assess fit to my resume. I get around 5-10 _possible_ positions per day and with human judgement that's usually down to 0-2, averaging about 0.5 per day.

I hear back from probably close to 10% but that's with a highly targeted approach, not just spamming my resume everywhere. And my pipeline is freaking full. It's a full time job doing prep and participating in all the interviews.

The only interview so far that's been a huge time sink has been anthropic's. But that's because I chose it. Their take home I have the option to use between 2 and 8 hours and I used the full 8 hours because I'm highly motivated and the position is well fit to my career history.

Maybe Oxide isn’t aiming to hire people who apply to 100 roles per month.

OK.

But that should be done later in the process. I'd rather an LLM auto-reject my application vs spending 5 hours on a writing exercise.

Think about, I apply to a minimum of 5 jobs per day. If I need to spend 5 hours for each application I'm spending 25 hours a day on job applications. Obviously this isn't possible.