Item — HN Reader

> We will do our best to provide a 15 minute break and/or lunch/coffee break during your interviews, especially if you'll be interviewing for more than 3 hours. That said, we are happy to accommodate additional breaks or fewer breaks, depending on your preferences, just let your recruiter or recruiting coordinator know!

I have seen this w/o breaks 5-7 interviews a day, too often. Some candidates suffer from low energy at the (n-1)th interview. The interviewer is baffled and gives a slightly negative feedback. The reason for the interviewee's interaction is not the skill of the interviewer.

So, in short - please keep breaks. You should have a 1h (min.) dedicated lunch break if you have a long 1-day interview. In additional, you should schedule 15m breaks in the morning and afternoon session to let the candidate recuperate. Finally, please ask your interviewers to look through the candidate schedule. Take into account that they have had many interviews, do your bit to make them comfortable. Also, please do not spin this as "If you can't go without breaks in a 7h day, you are not good enough to work here". Kindness, empathy helps and makes you a better employer.

4 comments

When Amazon interviewed me, it was something like 10:00 - 17:00 with no breaks. They didn't tell me that in advance, so i hadn't had a big breakfast.

I actually don't think they did this on purpose. When i mentioned to someone at the end of the day that there was no lunch break, they were surprised. I think it's just that they're such a constitutionally incompetent organisation that things like this will just happen from time to time.

Amazon just showed you it doesn't care about its people in the least.

That is accurate based on the 10 people I've known that have worked there.

it's also accurate based on all the news I see online...

Is there any evidence to suggest that more than 3 hours of interviews is actually beneficial? 7 hours of interview seems like overkill. I've never had more than a couple of hours of interview: an hour with the department head and another hour with my future line manager and/or another senior employee.

>>7 hours of interview seems like overkill.

There are companies that do this plus a bar raiser round. Some times two bar raiser rounds.

9 rounds is quite common in FAANGs.

There is also this condition that even single negative feed back after 9 hours of interviews. Like a 10 minute bad session in a 9 hour game disqualifies you. Like 8:50 of blazingly awesome performance is considered a waste even if the feed back was slightly negative in a 10 minute section.

This is basically a circus performance.

Recently had a couple of interviews with members of FAANG.

First was a quick call with a recruiter to make sure the role was a good fit. Then a prep call where I was told exactly what my interviews would be, then a 3 hour session with 10 minute breaks between each of three interviews.

The second was a similar quick call with a recruiter, then a 1 hour phone call technical screen. Then a prep call and ample prep material shared by the recruiter. Then a 5 hour session of 45 minute interviews with 15 minute breaks each hour.

These were both for technical roles, but not 100% engineering roles. Both processes were fully remote. I was struck by how well prepared I was, and how few surprises there were.

I had a chance to discuss the interview process with both companies, and they talked about changes in the process to support remote interviewing. The first indicated that there was no difference other than being remote. The second indicated that their typical interviews were full hours, rather than 45 minutes, but otherwise the number of interviews was the same.

FAANG will usually happily hire you if you had one bad on-site interview, but the rest were good.

I can fake who I am for 3 hours. I'm not sure I could do 7.

Your phrasing is such that I can't tell which side you are arguing for.

I love it!

Afaik, research suggests that interviewers know after 20 seconds whether they'll hire someone. I don't have references and don't know if this would translate well to tech interviewing, but I'd wager that the vast majority of a 7h interview day is totally pointless.

> "...interviewers know after 20 seconds whether they'll hire someone..."

Without even seeing a single like of code from the candidate? That definitely doesn't translate to tech interviewing. It takes at least 30 minutes to get enough code out of the candidate to form even a first impression.

> It takes at least 30 minutes to get enough code out of the candidate to form even a first impression.

Yeah, gonna stop you there. It takes less than 30 seconds to get a first impression. That's the whole point of first impressions. As soon as you see a person, you have a first impression.

I've talked to many interviewers - they all agree that they basically have an impression formed within the first few minutes and then use the interview to solidify that impression. It is wildly uncommon for them to come in, have a very negative first impression, and then have it completely turned around by the end.

Grandop said

> research suggests that interviewers know after 20 seconds whether they'll hire someone.

That’s not first impression, that’s a meaningful ability to see if I hire someone. I can tell you that without seeing code/discussing some previous experience there is zero chance I can form hiring decision for most reasonable candidate (the only 30 second hiring impression I can form is perhaps a negative one).

I meant to be less specific than "hire someone", but I'd wager that once a subconscious impression is formed, you'd be more likely to bias your interpretation of whatever else they say.

Right, I am sure I have a first impression, which could be good or bad, and that impression does inform my later views. However, just objectively I know for a fact that I declined some candidates I initially liked and I hired a few people who initially was super shy/not communicative.

This has definitely not been my experience when I do tech interviewing. Lots of people can talk the talk...

I believe it was more of subconscious thing, but again, just throwing it in. Might have been SciShow that remarked on it.

I wonder how much of that is like-me bias with the risk that 3 short interviews might get us (even) more homogenous employee populations?

I rarely have encountered an employer that is truly - actively - trying to avoid like-me bias. If they were even remotely successful, your interviews wouldn't almost always be constructed of 3 races... and various teams at orgs wouldn't have such wildly lopsided demographics.

Wouldn’t entire elimination of irrelevant bias mean that teams would have wildly varying demographics?

If I have 16 teams of 4 people each, I should probably expect to find an all female team and an all male team, if we assume that gender has no bearing on individual performance or on team selection and that gender bias was entirely removed, leaving the gender of each team member to a coin flip?

Similarly, I’d expect to find a fair number of teams who all had O+ blood type today, as I think we do not discriminate on that basis.

Team size is going to be important to note. The teams I'm talking about are frequently near 10 or more members.

As your point becomes more important as the size gets smaller. If it were all teams of 1 then each time would have incredible bias...

> I wonder how much of that is like-me bias

I am just crawling out of 4 months of hell of interviews and homeworks. And I can tell you: probably 90% of it. :(

How can I appear more like my interviewer in those first 20 seconds?

20 seconds? Nonsense.

Thirty minutes is usually enough to form an opinion, but the purpose of the other thirty is to gather supporting evidence, so that I can justify my hire/no hire decision.

If you are letting your interview candidates bomb their interview in less than 15 minutes, your expectations for them are highly unrealistic.

Yeeeahhhhh...

Which shows that bias is 99% of that thought process.

>"If you can't go without breaks in a 7h day, you are not good enough to work here"

even worse when you think it's really saying "if you can't go without breaks in a 7h day of meetings"

> in a 7h day of meetings

While still being expected to produce 10+ hours/day worth of software development.

It is even worse when it is legally required for employer to allow for an hour break after every 4 working hours.

Edit: It is at least where I live. (EU)

Typical US state laws are 15 minute paid break for every 4 hours and an unpaid 30 minute meal break for every 8 hours. The assumption is that these breaks must be scheduled for hourly workers but that “white collar, non-overtime” workers have enough flexibility to self schedule.

In the UK at least, it's not this generous, even with the legislation from the EU working time directive. What country are you in?

I live in Germany and it seems like I am incorrect (I looked it up), it is actually 30 minutes, for 9 hours of work. But my contract states it is 1 hour per day, which I assumed was the law. Sorry about the confusion!

NP, and good on you for having such a good contract!

I think the problem is that even with breaks, you can still be mentally exhausted by the last interview or two. For a normal work day, I wouldn't expect people to switch between writing completely different algorithms and problems so often. In a day of interviews, switching to a new problem five or six times can be exhausting.

Make sure your interview process isn't stacking too many in a row, or the signal from the last few is going to be pretty bad.