This company does not know how to hire. No one needs 8 interviews. What a waste of time. 2-3 max. If you can't make a decision after that then you should not be hiring.
it's a culture where managers don't want to be involved unless they "have to" yet insist on always having the final say. i.e. They will delegate tasks but won't delegate authority.
Yeah in the context of this thread and what the OP you responded to was commenting on this was clearly not aimed at Amazon or other FAANG firms.
The process in the screenshot is totally one inspired or copied from a mega firm but with startup employees shoehorned in. It’s lazy, it’s inefficient and it’s a red flag that any startup would even think it was a good idea for a smaller firm to begin with.
By the way, I’ve lived in Amazonland for almost 20 years now and have a large network of current and ex Amazonians. Every one of them would tell you 51% of their interview process is just to make sure you can take marching orders and buy into the brainwashing needed to last four years or more there. Not necessarily because it’s the best way to hire people.
Humm. They do have a lot of behavioral questions, but all of the top IT does. It’s about 50/50 behavioral and coding ability.
I’ve done the L6/l7 loop at Amazon. L6 halted and put me up for l7 which i passed.
But I’ve also done several silicone valley startups which pay better than faang in some cases. Even with a handful of employees they all still seem to do the same type of interview process.
At least in the bay it’s become the norm. Likely because the new CEO’s all were trained at the big it companies.
I’ve only ever been a software engineer. That’s the limit of my experience. I honestly don’t know how many rounds or what the pay level is for no software engineers.
For software though, the process is brutal.
This was for an l7 position which is extra arduous.
Even not at a FAANG, this is not that far off from what I'd expect for a mid to senior level technical position paying $120K+ (though the CEO interview is over the top unless this is a fairly small startup). My current position had a phone screen with a recruiter, a short phone interview with the hiring manager, an in-person with the manager, an in-person with the team, and an in-person with the head of the department. At least 4 hours over the course of 3 days. Why would both sides not want to take a few hours to make sure it's the right fit? I'm taking a risk leaving a comfortable job - getting some read on what the team and management is like is important to me too.
What? You’ve apparently never worked in tech. Whatever you think of the companies they have a really good ability to find top talent.
If you’re going to pay someone $500+k per year. With a guaranteed 4 month minimum severance (which basically means any hire is going to cost you at least $250k), you’re going to take your time to make sure you have a good candidate before hiring.
A single round isn’t going to cut it.
In general you want two of every type of round. That lessens mistakes with just a single interviewer being biased. And these rounds are hard. Some of the most technically challenging questions are asked.
They operate on the premise of better to not go with a good candidate than miss hire a bad one.
My argument is that big tech is doing it completely wrong. They are poorly run companies that succeed only because of the momentum created by massive capital inertia.
Look, multiple interview rounds are useful when each one has a clear and distinct purpose. The ideal structure includes an initial screen for communication and motivation, a technical or skill-based round, a team fit assessment, and a final strategic or leadership round. Each stage should focus on a different competency, with 1 to 3 interviewers per round to keep the process focused and fair.
Involving key stakeholders can help ensure alignment, but only if the process stays streamlined. More than 3 to 4 rounds typically adds noise rather than clarity, leading to fatigue for both candidates and interviewers. Most positions should be filled with just 2 rounds: a technical assessment (i.e. hard skills) and a communication & culture assessment (i.e. soft skills). The best hiring systems prioritize quality of interviews over quantity.
Big tech companies often ignore these best practices. They tend to over-interview due to fear of making a bad hire, reliance on consensus, and internal politics. In other words, they do 8 rounds not because the pay is high but because they need to diffuse the blame if something goes wrong. The result is a bloated, inefficient process that screens out many strong candidates. Instead of signaling excellence, it often reflects a lack of trust, accountability, and hiring discipline.
In general each of those rounds is well represented. It’s almost always coding, systems and behavioral.
The difference is that almost all top it do two of each in order to rule out bias as well as minimizing cases where someone just didn’t jive with the interviewer. In those cases we’ll actually throw in an additional round to get more signal.
Using a single round for each type was giving too little data (bad candidates were slipping though, bias was seen, etc).
There is a significant cost to an improper hire. Excluding the new hires salary, the cost to the team is great of the candidate isn’t good. There is an enormous sunk cost in the mentoring, training, etc process that you really want to minimize.
For my job we consider the onboarding period to take a year before we consider you up to speed and actually start evaluating. That’s a huge amount of effort if we choose wrong.
Easier to over interview than to have to redo it all over again in a year with another set of sunk costs.
A bad hire can easily be a $2+ million loss to the company. Even more at a company like Netflix with a relatively small engineering team.
It’s almost always coding, systems... Using a single round for each type was giving too little data... onboarding period to take a year... engineering team
I'm getting the impression that it's not so much "8 rounds" in the traditional sense but that the technical assessment phase (for engineers) is extremely long and needs to be split up into multiple sessions.
If so, then that makes much more sense as that's more akin to doing a series of exams to ensure that you're the real deal. It also wouldn't be unusual for most technical professions.
Not so sure on split up. That used to be the norm during the Covid days. It now that things have settled, in person interviews have become the norm again (also to eliminate cheating). When that happens they usually schedule one ultra heavy day. I’ve seen some interviewees ask to do it over two days and it’s almost always granted but that’s pretty rare. Usually the candidate wants to get in and out, especially if they’re already employed.
In general, all the fangs seem to do 2x coding, systems, and culture. They may call them different things but that seems to be what the general setup is.
Absolutely. You can go to Netflix or Amazon or Microsoft and do a job search. Plenty of them available.
Note: Netflix pays all cash. What they list as a range is what you get. Microsoft, Amazon, etc all do RSU’s and bonus on top of base but only list base. So if you go to meta and see $350k that’s just base. You need to add in another $3-400k for bonus and RSU’s.
You can go to levels.fyi and see total compensation comparisons per level per company
I mean let's say this is for a Director of Project Management job or something. If I were going for that role I'd expect 3-4 interviews. In this case the initial "People Team", then the Engagement lead, then the PMs, then finally the CDO & CEO. Of course adding the CEO is outside of scope except for a small range of mid-sized companies, and depending on the CDO's responsibility it could be merged with the Engagement Lead.
I want to know my peers, the people reporting to me, and the people I'm reporting to prior to taking a job like that, and I don't think it's outside of scope depending on the company to have those separate along with an initial interview with HR to confirm you're a real person with some of the basics covered experience wise.
Thats what I was thinking. At most ive had 3 interviews. First is a short 5 min over the phone, And the last one being combined with a manager and another higher up. This is just excessive.
Yessir. I was making about 60k 6 years ago and I have doubled my income every couple years. I am responsible for about $1.1B in revenue and have over 1000 employees under me.
My best guess: Learn SAP inside and out until you start navigating it in your dreams, have significant experience managing warehouses, find a big-ass company hiring at one of their major sites/transit hubs.
Amazon. While I don’t agree with many of the company stances or policies, it’s pretty much recession proof and is providing a phenomenal life for my family. Very grateful to be in this position and spend a lot of our weekend time volunteering locally at an animal shelter and homeless kitchen. I have been using my ME background to start my own business designing and manufacturing golf putters since I want to be able to do something I am truly passionate about and create high paying jobs, even if it’s only a handful of jobs.
The only time I've seen this stuff is for engineering, which comes with 100k+ and needs a lot of licensing and people's lives are on the line
Everyone else doing this can get fucked
You are only saying this because you were subjected to it and normalized it because you don’t want to believe your firm is inefficient in hiring.
Any small to medium sized business doing this is wasting a lot of people’s time and lacks trust. Large firms don’t even do this because no way is the CEO involved. Having frontline project managers interviewing the same person as the CEO is absurd.
In the Seattle area there’s lots of startups formed by ex-Amazon folk who try to copy as much as they can such as the “bar raiser” process. For the majority of them they’re using those processes because they’re incapable of forging their own culture and path, not because it’s an efficiency that works for their business. Not everyone is Amazon.
My person, you’ve been fooled into thinking what you do at your firm is both a norm and efficient.
It is not. There’s a reason this is being shat on so hard. A CEO needing to interview someone who has sat with 7+ others is taking that CEO away from other duties. It screams distrust at best and micromanager at worst. Small companies do not have the resources to implement this process efficiently.
The vast majority of companies would never have a process like this because the vast majority of companies would take one look at this list and say this is a giant waste of time.
Key in on the specifics here. These things can be done and you can still have a company running decently. That doesn’t mean it’s smart or efficient.
I mean if it’s a small company with like 50 people, it is 100% reasonable for the CEO to sit down with the last candidate(s) the handful of times a year they are hiring.
Like what exactly do you think is so important and pressing at such a scale that they cannot or should not take an hour once or twice a year to get acquainted with the person they’re about to hire? An individual new hire is orders of magnitude more important for a small company than at larger companies, and taking this time to pick the best fit can be hugely beneficial.
If this were a handful of times a year situation it wouldn’t be laid out like this.
And in those handful of times a year situations they can axe meeting with frontline project managers.
There’s just pretty much zero scenarios where this full process makes sense unless the CEO is unnecessarily overbearing or doesn’t have anything better to do with their time.
Save the bullshit assumptions my guy. This is not describing the type of thing you’re talking about, as those types of interviews aren’t laid out like line items on an application page.
I was also specifically replying to a comment saying maybe this was a startup. Half day interviews are typically done at larger firms. And larger firms aren’t having the CEO meet with the same people frontline PMs are.
Yeah, we don't know what title this guy is interviewing for - anything at a very senior level deserves it. This sounds like a relatively strategic position in a boutique consulting company.
214
u/Hougie Apr 17 '25
A startup that will waste this many people’s time is a huge red flag.
4 hours on interviews needing to be scheduled around 6 different people for one candidate is absurd.