<story><title>Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?</title><text>edit: I love this community!  Thank you so much for all the insight.  For those who complained, I&amp;#x27;m sorry if this post comes across as complainy or redundant, I respect the HN hive-mind and was genuinely curious about everyone&amp;#x27;s thoughts on the matter.&lt;p&gt;Hello fellow travelers, I&amp;#x27;ll do my best to keep this brief(ish).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been in IT professionally since Y2K, data entry-&amp;gt;QA-&amp;gt;SysAdmin-&amp;gt;PM-&amp;gt;consultant-&amp;gt;founder-&amp;gt;sold and with the money took some years off, bought some property and a fixer upper and went to school and got a BSBA degree (never graduated from high school but wanted to show my kids the importance of a degree).    I missed working and creating things with people so decided to reenter the job market in the PM space.  So now that my hat is in the ring I have been told by recruiters what I need to &amp;quot;expect&amp;quot; in this &amp;quot;new market.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I was told &amp;quot;5 to 7 interviews is normal&amp;quot;.  What?  I genuinely feel like I&amp;#x27;m having a &amp;#x27;Blast from the Past&amp;#x27; moment in this whole thing (good 90s romcom kids, look it up).&lt;p&gt;When did a hiring manager lose their authority and the trust of the organization to do their job?  Am I just out of touch?  How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive? Am i missing something?  HN, please help!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kstenerud</author><text>Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media. Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz? &amp;quot;Culture fit&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;Tech companies have the lowest infrastructure costs of any industry, and so they have no place to hang their risk aversive paranoia except on personnel (the safer you are, the more trivial the things you fear).&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s nothing logical about it, but since they have to fear something, it&amp;#x27;ll be whatever some douchebag with a following puts in their next &amp;quot;XYZ considered harmful&amp;quot; blog post.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grapeskin</author><text>All we need is a “3+ interviews considered harmful” post to hit HN a few months in a row and we can finally solve this problem.&lt;p&gt;That, or we’ll have some representative from the big 5 saying “Hey guys, Jayden from (x soulless Silicon Valley company) here. Not speaking on behalf of my employer but actually at X Corp(tm) we’ve found that anything less than 37 interviews (+tip) isn’t enough to let the real stars shine through. We’re all about finding the true team players who are a good culture fit” within 2 minutes of the post going up.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?</title><text>edit: I love this community!  Thank you so much for all the insight.  For those who complained, I&amp;#x27;m sorry if this post comes across as complainy or redundant, I respect the HN hive-mind and was genuinely curious about everyone&amp;#x27;s thoughts on the matter.&lt;p&gt;Hello fellow travelers, I&amp;#x27;ll do my best to keep this brief(ish).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been in IT professionally since Y2K, data entry-&amp;gt;QA-&amp;gt;SysAdmin-&amp;gt;PM-&amp;gt;consultant-&amp;gt;founder-&amp;gt;sold and with the money took some years off, bought some property and a fixer upper and went to school and got a BSBA degree (never graduated from high school but wanted to show my kids the importance of a degree).    I missed working and creating things with people so decided to reenter the job market in the PM space.  So now that my hat is in the ring I have been told by recruiters what I need to &amp;quot;expect&amp;quot; in this &amp;quot;new market.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I was told &amp;quot;5 to 7 interviews is normal&amp;quot;.  What?  I genuinely feel like I&amp;#x27;m having a &amp;#x27;Blast from the Past&amp;#x27; moment in this whole thing (good 90s romcom kids, look it up).&lt;p&gt;When did a hiring manager lose their authority and the trust of the organization to do their job?  Am I just out of touch?  How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive? Am i missing something?  HN, please help!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kstenerud</author><text>Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media. Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz? &amp;quot;Culture fit&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;Tech companies have the lowest infrastructure costs of any industry, and so they have no place to hang their risk aversive paranoia except on personnel (the safer you are, the more trivial the things you fear).&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s nothing logical about it, but since they have to fear something, it&amp;#x27;ll be whatever some douchebag with a following puts in their next &amp;quot;XYZ considered harmful&amp;quot; blog post.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>greggman3</author><text>Is FizzBuzz cargo cult? I had my own company in 1995. We tried to hire programmers. The candidate would come in and we&amp;#x27;d spend an hour interviewing. 9 out of 10 could not program at all and effectively wasted our time.&lt;p&gt;So, we switched to &amp;quot;here&amp;#x27;s a short test, go in this room and do the test&amp;quot;. Then we&amp;#x27;d look at their answers. If the answers were wrong&amp;#x2F;poor we&amp;#x27;d thank them for their time and excuse them. This way, less of our time was wasted. That test included an extremely small task like FizzBuzz. If you can&amp;#x27;t answer it you can&amp;#x27;t program, period! It filtered out the 9 out of 10 applicants who should never have applied in the first place and saved us a bunch of time.&lt;p&gt;At a big company the phone screen is supposed to do that but phone screens still take a hour or more of some engineer&amp;#x27;s time.</text></comment>