Post 2008 crash grad who eventually made it into engineering. I didnt realize this world existed so recently. I've never had less than three interviews for any job other than receptionist.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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Graduated with an engineering degree just before the teens and have always had multiple round interviews :/
I was a platform engineer for a cyber security company for 6+ years and had worked in another ramshackle garage-based startup before that. I was burnt out and angry all the time. On call for a week out of every month.
I recently got a job writing software fully remote for a medical device company with a single 30min interview with a non-technical manager.
They don't even know how to use my skills well. My "mentor" can hardly write an Excel formula. My boss has once seen an excruciatingly simple app I made at someone else's request. I built it in a couple hours. It has a file chooser button and a run button. Blew her mind. Multi-platform builds are now automated via CI/CD. I seriously over-deliver and they won't ever know it.
I actually put in about 30 hours/week and bill 40. I have 3-4 short meetings a week to interface with a couple vendors. None of them, even my 1:1 with my boss is on camera. It just isn't done. I get maybe 2 chat messages and 2 emails a day.
Easiest $150k/yr ever. And my spouse has great benefits through work.
Why the hell would I ever go back to "tech?"
medical device company with a single 30min interview with a non-technical manager.
Easiest $150k/yr ever. And my spouse has great benefits through work.
You hiring? Jesus that sounds amazing
Im in my last year of highschool.... this scares me
I did five interviews and a project for the last job I didnt get. I'm scheduled for interview number four for a job I'm working now.
When I was hiring engineers I capped it at three interviews, maximum two hours of candidate time.
The reality is that if you know shit about your job, you will know if someone is a good fit in the first 10 minutes. If they suck, you will know it faster. It doesn't take hours and weeks to hire people, you just have to grow a set and be secure that you know your shit.
Google has done studies and experiments with their hiring process and determined that after three interviews you aren't getting any more signal about candidate quality. Their internal interview training talks about this, I've read their reports and the methodology seemed pretty sound. Yet for some reason they still usually do five interviews. Why? I never did get a good answer for that.
I'm going to do my favorite thing and blame HR. Useless lot of muppets they are. I have yet to work with an HRBP that was anything better than useless. Ask a question about worker rights in India or Singapore, get dumb looks and an empty promise to find out. Ask for support when hiring, yeah that is someone else, but we dont know who.
Time and time they just fail to deliver anything useful. I just cannot overstate how underwhelmed I am with the entire discipline. From the chronic laziness to the ingrained stupidity of them, I have no idea why they still exist. I don't even know how they buy groceries, pay their bills and walk upright. I presume they go back to a building where they are locked into a case, hoses attached to feed and extract waste while they just stare into the middle distance. They dont need to be sedated or entertained as they dont know or care about the process. They just exist.
Second everything you said, good god. If I ask HR a question I'm lucky to hear back in a week if at all. They ask us to sign shit, I sign it, they ask me to sign the same shit I signed because nobody checked their inbox for my reply.
I've seen this and the other extreme, like at my current job. We hire basically anyone, overlooking obvious flaws, then give them a basically blank check for fucking up. I don't know why no one can get the balance right. Don't hire just anyone, but also don't grill the living shit out of the candidate! A single one hour interview is probably enough, but also don't be so forgiving that anything off about the candidate needs to be noticed by everyone on the hiring panel to matter.
I feel like every time I have changed jobs the number of interview sessions has gone up by one. My first job didn’t even have a coding session, just a single conversation with the boss and another engineer.
I’m job hunting right now and it is so ridiculous how many interviews I have for each place. The last one I went through an hr phone call, a manager phone call, a remote coding session, a presentation, a whiteboard coding session, a schematic review, a general C++ quiz/architecture conversation and a follow on remote coding session. I ended up not getting it because the whiteboard guy didn’t like that I didn’t remember the formula for an n-dimensional plane off the top of my head.
I just did and got it actually
yeah, it's absolutely madness that some companies expect people to go through 3 to 6 rounds to receive a "we'll let you know"
I just reject those companies. And i let them know. Politely but still let them know.
Its worked out well last couple of years.
Same, I've started just stating I have a maximum of 3 interviews I do before I auto-reject the offer.
This has had interesting results.
I'd like to know more about the interesting results you've gotten if you don't mind sharing.
What kind of interesting?