Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
I&#x27;m not sure why part time contract style &quot;interviews&quot; aren&#x27;t more common.<p>If I ever got into a situation where I was hiring, it would start with a 2 hour conversation. No coding questions. I want to get to know you and also talk shop about applicable technologies.<p>Then after that is simple. I would hire you to do 5-30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. The interviewer would do the driving to eliminate large amounts of ramp up time. This could be anything from R&amp;D to implementing something real that&#x27;ll ship to production. This would be paid work of course and the schedule would be based on the interviewee&#x27;s availability, hopefully at least a few hours a day. The duration depends on how well of a match they are, a better match would have more hours just to filter things over a longer sample size.<p>The person pairing with them (a currently employed dev &#x2F; tech lead &#x2F; CTO, etc.) would be doing this work anyways so it&#x27;s not a time sink, as opposed to them stopping their &quot;real&quot; work to do 5 technical interviews.<p>I&#x27;m guessing this would give both a good assessment of how the interviewee thinks through problems and you can get a good sense of where they&#x27;re at technically. Also you get to see how well you mesh together from a &quot;do I want to work with this person every day?&quot; standpoint. It&#x27;s also super low risk for the company because you don&#x27;t need to go through the entire costly hiring process up front. It also lets the person interviewing for the job get a better sense of what it&#x27;ll be like to really work there.<p>It&#x27;s a win &#x2F; win. Why isn&#x27;t this more popular?