Interesting. Would you mind sharing in which country you work (or if America, which state), what your field of interest is, and how long you've been in the business?

My team has full-day interviews and I'm curious to see who has been self-selecting out of this.

Wow. I live in Sweden, and I have the same expectations: I would not really want to spend much time on an interview process, and I have never, ever heard of day-long interviews either!

We have had a perpetual shortage of developers though, it sounds much harder to land a job in the US.

To clarify, full day means 4 sessions of an hour each bridged by lunch (1 hr). The hope is to give the candidate sufficient information about the team while the team gathers info about the candidate.

That sounds pretty typical. In practice, it's not unusual to do one or more of the interviews by video because of travel schedules but four "in person" interviews is probably the norm.

Yeah, that’s how I understood it, but there’s often opposition on HN to that process.

I guess if you're hiring junior people to stick in a standardized box, it's mostly just a numbers game. Way back when I got a job offer out of school strictly based on my resume (took another job).

But even when the interview process was mostly a formality because I knew many of the people and they knew my work, I still had some on-site interviews.

I'm pretty sure on-site interviews are the norm for the vast majority of professional jobs. Including, or perhaps especially, for the most senior positions.

Netherland here. Interviews take an hour. I don't think I've ever had a full-day interview, though I may have had two interviews in a row. Not sure if they were two half-hour or two full-hour interviews. I have had an on-site assessment of some sort many years ago. Didn't like it much.

I'd much rather do a take-home test than spend a full day getting grilled in interviews.

>My team has full-day interviews and I'm curious to see who has been self-selecting out of this.

Anyone with any level of self-confidence, worth and respect.

To offer a counter-point, I have a level of self-confidence, worth and respect, I wouldn't join a company without a full day of interviewing with them to get an understanding for the company.

I don't know if people are getting hung up on the term "full day" but I'm not sure I've ever heard of people being hired for senior (or even not so senior) professional roles without having multiple in-person interviews.

I suppose there are distributed companies that just do things over video link these days (and I've interviewed people over a video link when necessitated by travel schedules or people being in different locations). But some number of in-person interviews over the course of 4 or 5 hours is absolutely standard in my experience.

"Full day" absolutely matters though, especially if you want to attract passive candidates.

If I'm unemployed, then full day is fine. If I'm really keen to get out of my current job, or really keen to work for you, then I might do it. But if I'm just exploring opportunities, or I have other options in progress, then I'm not taking a day off just to interview.

With any interview when it might be really obvious 10 minutes in that it's not going to work. If I've scheduled that during my lunch break, or for an hour before/after work, then that's a small cost.

If I take a day off work to interview, then that's costing me in the order of $1000. If I don't know whether I want to work for you, then why would I do it? And I definitely can't do that for 5-10 different roles that I might apply for.

A full day is also quite hard work. Interviews are stressful. Dealing with people you don't know, trying to make sure you don't do/say something stupid, it gets exhausting.

I generally expect 4-6 hours worth of interviews before an offer, but the typical process stretches those over a few weeks, which allows the candidate to fit them into available blocks of free time, and gives the candidate oppotunities to think about how things went, what questions to ask, whether this seems like the right fit, and pull out at any point.

I'm a freelancer, so that's a bit different, but I admit I'm surprised at how brief and superficial the intake to hire me usually is.

For permanent jobs, it's usually an hour long interview followed by a programming assessment; either take-home and then presenting to their developers, or codility. But for freelance work, none of that. Just a talk and they hire me. But of course if I turn out to be useless, a freelancer is easy to fire.

(I don't like video interviews much.)

Video interviews are definitely less good than in-person from my perspective. But between the fact that the teams asking me to interview candidates are pretty distributed and have people who travel a lot as I do, it's pretty hard to get all the "right" people into an office on the same day.

As for hiring freelancers, I'm not involved in hiring programmers but we use external people for various other things. We've try to use people we have experience with but it's mostly not a big deal. If we don't like the work they do, maybe we're out a few bucks but we just don't hire them again.

I'm the UK, 15-20 years experience, depending how you count it, and my skill-set is diverse :)

Thank you. I've definitely seen a greater resistance to the full day interview process when hiring in London. I never did learn to hire properly for London. I think there's a cultural difference between there and the Bay.

Same and I would point-blank refuse any full day interviews (unless they were going to pay my going contract rate, I suppose.)