Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain <i>some</i> of the logic behind it. I&#x27;m not saying this logic is <i>valid</i>, but it&#x27;s how we got here, imho.<p>First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren&#x27;t a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don&#x27;t want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager, so they <i>also</i> need to interview you too and have a say.<p>Second: Is it really fair to have just one or two developers evaluate you? When I first was an interviewer, I liked everybody! I would have hired them all. So getting multiple data points <i>matters</i>. Best to have at least a couple dev interviews.<p>Then there&#x27;s the whole problem of needing to evaluate you on multiple dimensions. Can one interview really tell if you&#x27;re good problem solving, coding, algorithms&#x2F;data structures, and any specialization the role has? What about the soft skills aspect? We&#x27;re going to need to have at least 3 or 4 interviews to cover all these aspects. These roles pay a huge sum of money, so there&#x27;s a lot of worry that someone will be hired who doesn&#x27;t really meet the bar, you know?<p>But now we have a bigger problem: if we&#x27;re going to invest 4+ people to spend an hour of time with you each, we&#x27;d better have <i>some</i> data points that you&#x27;re worth that investment. So maybe we need one or two initial interviews ahead of time to weed out any obviously unlikely candidates.<p>After that, it&#x27;s every other company going &quot;Oh shit, Amazon does 6 interviews? We should do that too!&quot;.