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by observer1 5289 days ago
"....this process, starting from ~50+ raw leads whittled down into ~40 initial phone interviews/coding challenges, which went to ~25 next stage interviews, eventually down to ~6 really good offers, all in about ~1.5 weeks."

Does this timeframe seem a little dubious to anyone else? I count 65 technical interviews plus interviews with hiring managers, etc., followed by receiving offers. And all of this happening in about 8 days. This story would be a lot more believable if it had a realistic timeframe.
4 comments
sgrove 5289 days ago
Nope, it's true. I woke up early in the morning (easy to do sleeping on the kitchen floor in mountain view without a heater), went through craigslist every morning, had an email template I'd individualize for each posting, and send it out. I'd work through the code challenges as they came in, set phone interviews into the late night, in-person interviews in the city during lunch, etc.

It happened, I took it pretty seriously because of the impending cliff of being homeless.

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angelbob 5289 days ago
The 25 next-stage interviews are the only part that sounds even slightly unrealistic to me. The phone interviews are 30-60 minutes each, so 40 of them is no problem (20-40 hours of work).

The next-stage interviews are going to vary from 1-2 hours to a full day, so I assume he didn't do many full-day interviews in that 10-11 days, or probably 7-8 workdays.

But startups are often far more willing to do remote interviews, interviews at weird times, interviews on weekends... It would be a packed 1.5 weeks, though.

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jrockway 5289 days ago
Indeed. It took me about 7 months from "Hey, do you want to work at Google" to getting an offer. I would expect other companies are similar.
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Timothee 5289 days ago
Besides the apparent mismatch between hours in a day and hours necessary for all that to happen in 1.5 weeks (well, it's technically possible), what surprised me was just even that 40 companies out of 50 were responsive enough to schedule phone interviews in that time. And next stage interviews after that. And make a decision to hire him. Especially for a self-proclaimed bad coder.

So, I agree with you, but this is not really the point of the post. The point is that interviewing is a game that you can master with practice.

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