Loosely related, how do you pull this off? Given that interviews effectively take up whole days, I feel like it'd be really tough for me to routinely work four day weeks and everyone at the office be OK with it.
As the sister comment notes, many interviews are either by phone/videochat, or an hour or two in the office. I do the occasional all-day meeting, but not more often than every month or two.
One perk of my current gig is a very high level of flexibility (I'm in the actual office maybe 15-20 hours per week, and work from home or coffeeshops the rest of the time), which makes this much more viable.
>> "Given that interviews effectively take up whole days"
Really? I find they are either an hour in the office or a few 30 minute phone calls. At least in tech. I know in other fields they have all day group interviews with lots of team building stuff but I haven't encountered that in tech (well at least with startups).
In my experience, I have had 3-6 hour long blocks with 1-3 members of the company, technical and non-technical. It typically starts with 5-10 minutes of chit-chat about my background and the company, then we do a technical exercise or a series of personality questions (for instance, explaining something technical to an employee in marketing to see if we could work together and if I could communicate across departments). After that, we wrap up with ~10 minutes of Q&A. Since it takes up so much time, it's important to get the phone screen right to not waste time on both sides. I have heard of companies that will have you pair program for a whole day instead of doing whiteboard questions.
I don't think I would do well in those sorts of interviews. I guess my experience is different because I've only interviewed remotely (remote interview, on site job). So they were typically 2-3 30 min Skype calls with different members of the company (CEO, CTO, Investor occasionally) and then I would send through code for them to look at or they would give me a small feature of their product to develop (1-2 days paid remote work) and review me based on that.
That kind of coding interview would be ideal too, but that takes more total time than 4-6 hours. It's 8-16 hours total vs 3-6 hours. When an engineer has a FT position already, they can't easily commit that much time as you can as a freelancer.
One perk of my current gig is a very high level of flexibility (I'm in the actual office maybe 15-20 hours per week, and work from home or coffeeshops the rest of the time), which makes this much more viable.