[cmansley]

This was exactly my experience. Everything from the two technical interviews with the addition of a third to the technical questions with queries about bugs in the code. I think 2->3 conversion is exactly what you said. The first two interviewers split on their opinion of you, so you get scheduled a tie-breaker interview. Unfortunately for me, the tie-breaker interview was my worst, partly due to me and partly due to non-existant feedback for 45 minutes on the part of the interviewer.

But, I believe there is a method to the madness. They have so many qualified applicants that they would rather err on the side of caution. They would rather reduce the false-positives even if the number of false-negatives grows. They can afford this luxury. They want the best and they can afford rejecting good candidates.

My favorite way of thinking about this was from Steve Yegge's blog post about the interview process : "Because of the inherently flawed nature of the interviewing process, it's highly likely that someone on the loop will be unimpressed with you, even if you are Alan Turing. Especially if you're Alan Turing, in fact, since it means you obviously don't know C++"