Each "technical interview" I've been to is about 3-6 hrs. I've yet to see a Silicon Valley technical interview where it's not at least 3 hrs, meeting with 3 people. So right there, fitting 25 "next stage" interviews in 1.5 weeks is bullshit.
Where is he going to find the time for 40 initial phone interviews? That requires talking with the recruiter, and then the recruiter scheduling time with a developer. Anyone who has realistically interviewed in Silicon Valley knows that recruiters are very slow, and things tend to get muddled up very easily.
In 1.5 weeks, assuming they don't interview on weekends, that's 6 1-hr phone screens, plus 3 on-site interviews per day. The logistics simply don't work. It's a complete lie. If he had said 1 month, then it still would have been impossible with 1.5 phone screens and 1 on-sites per day, but it would have been slightly more believable than 1.5 weeks.
There is a spectrum. The elite companies have all-day interviews (Google). Middle-tier tech companies have half-day interviews (Amazon). Big non-tech companies have a couple-hour interview (Bank of America). Small companies can vary, but I've gotten hired off a quick IRC chat. I have no idea what the average startup's culture is like, but they probably don't have 5 hours of developer time to waste on each candidate. So instead, they have a short interview instead of a long one.
Sorry buddy, but please explain the complete discrepancy in what you reported.
How do you fit 3 on-sites and 6 interviews per day? Even if your onsites were 1 hr long and they offered you a job after a single interview, you still have to drive back and forth to each location. How did you have time for the 6 phone screens per day?
I didn't have a car actually. I just scheduled all the interviews as close to possible every day, and walked around SOMA/FiDi from morning until evening going through different stages of different interviews - initial chat (morning coffee/lunch/dinner/drinks), whiteboarding session, meet with the team, build a mini-project, discuss final offer.
Each successive stage is more time intensive, but there were also fewer of them. There's a lot of noise, especially in the beginning, so a lot drop off very quickly. From there, it was just a matter of tightly packing the schedule and doing it from day to night.
Like I said, the "you'll be homeless again very soon" factor was a big one for me.
Even more interesting then, because you just lost 2 hrs every day commuting back and forth on Caltrain.
"Each successive stage is more time intensive, but there were also fewer of them."
You just said you had 25 onsites. Unless you knew beforehand that you were going to cut out of them early, there's no way you could have scheduled 3 per day. And at 6 phone screens per day, the last 2-3 days worth of phone screens occurring near the end of the 1.5 week period would not have been able to produce an onsite within 1 or 2 days, therefore, that means most of the 40 phone interviews must have been front loaded in those 1.5 weeks, with the onsites being back-end loaded. Which means that your density of onsites would have been higher than 3 per day.
It's a great story, but you should use more realistic numbers next time.
Each "technical interview" I've been to is about 3-6 hrs. I've yet to see a Silicon Valley technical interview where it's not at least 3 hrs, meeting with 3 people. So right there, fitting 25 "next stage" interviews in 1.5 weeks is bullshit.
Where is he going to find the time for 40 initial phone interviews? That requires talking with the recruiter, and then the recruiter scheduling time with a developer. Anyone who has realistically interviewed in Silicon Valley knows that recruiters are very slow, and things tend to get muddled up very easily.
In 1.5 weeks, assuming they don't interview on weekends, that's 6 1-hr phone screens, plus 3 on-site interviews per day. The logistics simply don't work. It's a complete lie. If he had said 1 month, then it still would have been impossible with 1.5 phone screens and 1 on-sites per day, but it would have been slightly more believable than 1.5 weeks.