Well, recently I interviewed at a place where they called me in 18 rounds of interviews over almost 3.5 full days.
The only reason I was putting up with them was because of friend inside who had referred me. The thing is they made me right endless code rounds after rounds and I did code pretty well. I solved close to 90% of the problems without the internet. But most of them were coding problems.
During the final rounds, I don't know what got into them. They started going into Core CS areas. And damn then they started the Algo pop quiz. Some how during the last 3-4 rounds they started giving out the perception that they were not happy with some one who did not know the algorithms from the book memorized by heart. And that even good coding skills can't compensate for that.
After that they called me back and told, that some other department from the same company would like to have an another round. I just politely denied and, cut the call.
I worked in a company that did that a couple of times, but not to that extent. Usually the job description wasn't well defined and the candidate didn't have any champions within the company. We would keep on bringing the candidate in over and over in the hope that some new perspective would make the choice obvious. (it never did)
Oddly enough, when you decline to continue interviewing they often immediately send you a job offer.
Frankly speaking if you can't decide about a candidate after 3.5 days of interviewing there's probably something really badly broken about your interviewing process. Or just that its so inefficient.
I wouldn't have accepted the offer from the company, from the very outlook it looked like bureaucratic jungle where no one is capable of taking a decision/risk until they run through some 20 meetings to decide what to do. And then toss it on to some one else.
For that if this is what you make candidate run through, you are sure to get CareerCup interview questions ebook masters but not good programmers.
Phone interviews or in person? I think after 3 such I would have decided these people just couldn't make decisions or were such a political organization they would have been toxic to work for. Did your contact give any insight into this inefficiency?
The only reason I was putting up with them was because of friend inside who had referred me. The thing is they made me right endless code rounds after rounds and I did code pretty well. I solved close to 90% of the problems without the internet. But most of them were coding problems.
During the final rounds, I don't know what got into them. They started going into Core CS areas. And damn then they started the Algo pop quiz. Some how during the last 3-4 rounds they started giving out the perception that they were not happy with some one who did not know the algorithms from the book memorized by heart. And that even good coding skills can't compensate for that.
After that they called me back and told, that some other department from the same company would like to have an another round. I just politely denied and, cut the call.