[throwawaydad12]

I've been at this for almost 40 years, and it's shocking to me how little urgency there is to hiring over the last 5-10 years. I have a sinecure but still interview from time to time. Compared to (say) 1990, it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive.

In principle, I'm likely someone that hiring managers are looking for, and really a pretty good deal. In practice, I'll probably just retire rather than throw my hat into the ring again. Or--since I have a vindictive sense of humor--maybe I'll spend my retirement doing "fake" interviews with prospective employers.

[pyb]

This. It's been a buyers market in the last decade. If employers were really struggling to hire great engineers, they wouldn't be "playing with their food" so much.

[dennis_jeeves1]

>it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive.

I think it's this one of the parts that really ticks someone like me off. Most interviewers know almost upfront 10 minutes into into the interview if they are going to reject you, yet they can often drag on for an hour, under the guise of knowing, your 'approach' a problem.

[hnfong]

Hiring decisions are generally not made by only one person. The interviewee might be performing poorly on one interview, but the interviewer doesn't know how it went on the others. Shutting off the interviewee 10 minutes into a one-hour interview session would backfire pretty badly unless the interviewer is sure that those 10 minutes was enough to determine the candidate definitely isn't hire-worthy (which is different from voting to pass on the candidate). The (Bayesian) priors of that happening should be pretty low if the screening process was working as intended.

Making the wrong call would entail the interviewee potentially feeling offended, which could be an issue if the ultimate decision was to make an offer to them -- they might reject the offer due to this experience alone. Not to mention it would be pretty awkward to work with a new colleague where you walked out on him as an interviewer. (In general you really don't want colleagues to know that you voted to pass on them)

In general if a candidate thinks they're getting nowhere they can suggest to stop the interview. Nobody can stop you from cutting it short and leave if those 50 minutes are important to you.

(Also, FWIW I don't think saving a hypothetical 50 minutes of interview time is what the GP was specifically referring to...)

[throwawaydad12]

I think reasonable people will give allowance to the hiring loop taking a day or two to synchronize on their earnest opinion of a candidate. I'm not bothered by that at all.

More disturbing are the cases where the hiring organization knows in advance that they _will not_ hire a candidate. IMO, it's unethical to waste someone's time on that.

In my personal experience, I had a FAANG drag me along for six months, passing screen after screen, only to be put off at the end for a "flaw" that was obvious from day one on my resume. I'll accept your judgement, but don't waste 50 hours of my time discovering something you could have learned in 60s by reading my resume.

Hirers complain about not being able to find candidates. This is one huge reason why.

I've been thinking about charging $1000, up front, for a day's interview. Sounds like an arrogant, asshole move. But still, what would be better?