[irrational]

This is crazy for me to read. We hire senior engineers based on a single hour long group interview. I've never participated in an interview (either as an interviewer or interviewee) that has gone on for more than a single hour. We will interview about 5 candidates over a week's time and then offer the position to one of them (or keep looking if none are suitable).

[zo1]

Same here - You can tell immediately within 10-15 minutes if a person has "the right stuff". Anything above that is just you sucking tiny milliliters of juice out of a carrot hoping that "maybe" they'll work out and you can get "some" productivity out of them down the line or "maybe" they're secretly a really good developer.

Either that, or the amount of time you subject potential hires is just a "signal" of your power and a filter for the needy, desperate and intellectually invested. I guess some companies are looking for that.

[naavis]

> You can tell immediately within 10-15 minutes if a person has "the right stuff"

I do a lot of interviewing for our company, and I used to think this too. But I've been totally wrong a few times. Sometimes someone I've been 100% sure about has been let go after a few months, while some I've been very iffy about have turned out to be excellent coworkers.

[slyn]

I used to be in restaurant management and I recently got a job in entry level IT for the first time in 15+ years for work/life balance.

The best 2-3 hires I ever made as a restaurant manager I knew they would be great within minutes of starting the interview. Other than those outliers I would say a great hiring manager was about twice as likely to have a productive hire as a bad hiring manager. Great hiring managers were batting around 0.600, almost regardless of if it were a relatively “technical” position or not. At some level it was just a crapshoot.

[mehh]

Yup, the danger of the suss them out in 10 mins, is you won’t get diversity (I don’t mean race and all that bandwagon), you’ll miss some exceptional outliers imho.

[throwaway6734]

Agree. It's not entirely a crapshoot but a good bit of the "hire"/"no hire" is vibes based.

[prox]

Isn’t the portfolio they came with a huge indicator? Like did this person do well at X or Y.

Even when fresh out of school one should see what someone is capable of.

[dustymcp]

Not necessarily, chemistry is such a big part of the selection aswell, you might have the criteria's for working somewhere, but do you also fit with culture? Many i have worked with would much prefer a person with less criteria and better culture fit, since with good fit you can easily learn the person what they need, and regardless of codebases most people will need some sort of onboarding for a new position anyway, good culture fit makes this transition much faster.

I would filter out the ones that have the criterias, and then see how they fit with current culture rather than roasting them with tests.

Like you do in any other business setting..

[Roark66]

Well, I participated in one interview that took longer than an hour. It was supposed to be "an initial interview". With another to follow in a week or so.

It turned into: "an initial interview; meet potential future co-workers and manager; have them see me do some actual work they do; meet the company owner(as he happened to be there);meet the accounting person and haggle over proposed pay; meet the HR person and haggle over minor changes in the employment contract;finally sign the contract" all in about ~7h. Coming in I was expecting to spend an hour there, but I was pleased with the outcome. I spent 6 years working there leaving only because of a move to another city.

[laserbeam]

It all depends on how many applicants you get. If you're as big as Google and everyone and their grandmother applies, you can afford to have longer interview rounds for positions where you need to be thorough. Otherwise you spend more effort in bringing people to the interview.

[irrational]

We are a Fortune 100 company that everyone on the planet has heard of. We typically get 500+ applications per position. But we still only do a single hour interview to make a decision.