[fragmede]

Computing is cheap these days. If somewhere has a multi-hour build, that is a noxious build system smell. Run away. Or make sure the role involves you getting paid to optimize it. If a build takes 2 hours, and you work 8 hours days, it means you get four tries in one day to get it right? Four!

That is no way to do modern computing. Things were worse back in the day (we compiled uphill, both ways), but we're not in those days any more. Buy bigger & faster servers with more RAM until the problem goes away. It won't necessarily be cheap. But if the company is too stingy, and would prefer to be pennywise and pound foolish (saving "pennies" on a server vs developer time to sit there waiting for "compiles"), you don't want to work there.

[AtlasBarfed]

What drives me a bit nuts is when dynamically evaluated languages (which theoretically punt their compilation to lazy on-demand runtime compilation/evaluation) become monstrosities in the build cycle complete with painfully slow compilation and package resolution.