TL;DR - you can say no to the people who have normalized that, and still be highly successful
With the emergence of Google, et al, and the image of being elite, so came the emergence of nonsense like this: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/here-are-all-the-docume.... Getting butts in seats and long processes have replaced getting to know people before hiring them. The burden has been put on the candidate by the process.
I'm with you, OP. I remember the days of simpler processes. After going through the hoops of 5+ interview rounds in 2019 and 2020, I decided to apply limits to what I was willing to do for interviews. For example; I won't do leetcode, I won't enter a process with more than three steps, I won't give more than 5 hours to a process. This has significantly reduced the number of positions available to me, but the positive result is that the positions that do fit into my ruleset are high-quality, smaller companies, with more upside than the larger companies. I find that the companies that do fit into my ruleset about interviews actually want to get to know who I am and what I'm bringing, rather than if I'll just fit an open role or some quota. Now I'm not making FAANG salaries nor benefits, but I really enjoy the work I'm doing, the people I'm building with, and I'm very well taken care of financially.
Yeah - this resonates. I think people understand that if you're a FANG and you hire many people and you have orders of magnitude more applicants, you can (maybe need) have a difficult hiring process with a high bar. The problem is that many other companies look to their hiring process as an industry best practice when it is unnecessary. Now you have to do leetcode and too many interviews for everything
"TL;DR - you can say no to the people who have normalized that, and still be highly successful"
100%. I changed roles recently. If a recruiter described such a lengthy process, I simply told them I neither had the time nor the desire to take part. The worst interview process I actually went through with was originally supposed to be 4 1-hour sessions across multiple days, which the recruiter arranged to have compressed to 4 30-minute sessions back to back. I agreed and ended up accepting an offer.
More of us need to push back on the inconsiderate demands on our time. There's a shortage of developers and we have plenty of other options if they want to make the hiring process so unpleasant.
With the emergence of Google, et al, and the image of being elite, so came the emergence of nonsense like this: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/here-are-all-the-docume.... Getting butts in seats and long processes have replaced getting to know people before hiring them. The burden has been put on the candidate by the process.
I'm with you, OP. I remember the days of simpler processes. After going through the hoops of 5+ interview rounds in 2019 and 2020, I decided to apply limits to what I was willing to do for interviews. For example; I won't do leetcode, I won't enter a process with more than three steps, I won't give more than 5 hours to a process. This has significantly reduced the number of positions available to me, but the positive result is that the positions that do fit into my ruleset are high-quality, smaller companies, with more upside than the larger companies. I find that the companies that do fit into my ruleset about interviews actually want to get to know who I am and what I'm bringing, rather than if I'll just fit an open role or some quota. Now I'm not making FAANG salaries nor benefits, but I really enjoy the work I'm doing, the people I'm building with, and I'm very well taken care of financially.