I am not the person you are responding to, but multiple day interviews are pretty common in silicon valley. A few weeks ago I did a whole day interview of nothing but frigging white board exercises while they stared in their phones and look annoyed when I talked to them., and didn't question me about my resume or otherwise try to figure out if I was a fit or skilled beyond implementing memcpy twice in a row (I shit you not). That's a bit unfair, there were good questions, and good interviewers as well, but it was still just "find the bug", "implement XX". Then they called me and asked for another round. Uh, no. I then hear I'm ungrateful because they were prepared to throw a bunch of money at me. Oh la-de-friggin-da.

Hmm, obviously had something to get off my chest there. But interviews can go 2-3 rounds on the phone alone, 1 day or more on technical, and then more to actually talk to the team. It works for some companies because they have a steady stream of people that want to work for "Google" or whoever. Then everyone w/o the reputation of Google decide they should be like Google, follow suit, and you have the current madness.

There is the fact that a bad hire is extremely expensive, and it makes sense to be careful. But what working, skilled person has the time for such impersonal, multi-day efforts? When I put my resume on the street I had multiple inquiries from Yahoo, Amazon, Google, not to mention a bunch of smaller players. Just dealing with the proposed phone interviews would be a full time job, and I'd have to take a month off to go interview with them just to make an informed decision (why take the first job that comes along).

Something is seriously broken. So long as it is possible for me I'm not going to play the game, and do it the old school way - connections, people that know my work, and so on. But the trouble is, your connection ends up at a big company, and they are powerless to stop the HR/"best practices" juggernaut.

Thank you for shining a light on this madness. I've had the same experiences here in SV and these "extreme hiring" practices don't seem sustainable to me.

I've been lately thinking that perhaps we'd be better off with a more fluid style of hiring, say something involving real probation periods after which both parties assess how things are going and decide whether to continue. That approach is complicated, though, by the fact that on-boarding an employee is costly. Perhaps THAT's what we need to optimize.

A very successful department lead I know exclusively uses a probationary hiring practice on top of a pretty extensive set of interviews and coding tests (a bit excessive for my taste, but meh).

Candidates are told up front about the probationary period and can back out if they want, but everybody who works there accepted it. It's amazing how many people make it through the hiring gauntlet (no matter how extensive, rigorous or complex she made it) and the completely bombed out during actual work.

Interestingly for the ones that don't work out, most of the time, the employees (I'm calling them that because that's what they are) opt to leave before the end of the probationary period. Nobody's upset about this because it's all handled professionally and sometimes people just don't work out.

However, the ones that make it past the probationary period are really really good employees. I think the average employment period with her company is around 5 years and while she's run the show they've had 99.999% up time in an industry that would probably get by just fine with an 80% up time.

Yeah I've interviewed in Seattle and Chicago mostly. A couple half day visits sounds like a day's worth to me. :)

You're right I'm talking more like 4-6 hours... but at that point you need to schedule the entire day for it so you can be on time, leave room for extra time to talk if the employer wants, etc.

So again, it's not that it is exactly 8 hours, but that it pretty much takes up a day.