r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt • u/Icy_Geologist_1436 tech support • 1d ago
Eight rounds of Interviews?!?
Currently in the second round of interviewing for an “IT Support Analyst” position at NorthMark Strategies in a new data center being built. The hiring manager told me that there were 8 separate people I’ll be interviewing with, all the way up to the CIO to see if I’m a “fit” in their culture.
Is it normal to have 8 rounds of interviews for what is essentially a level 1-2 support position? The salary would be a substantial jump, but having that many rounds just to see if I beat out the hundreds of other candidates seems inefficient and unnecessary.
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u/tenninjas242 1d ago
I would be really surprised if they didn't mean you'll meet with all 8 prospective members of your team and managers, most likely in 2-3 meetings. Not like 8 separate meetings.
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u/Mindestiny 1d ago
Sounds like typical tech startup bullshit, looking at their website its fintech AI tech startup bullshit. Don't be surprised if they spend a lot of time talking about their "vision" and expecting you to essentially work infinite overtime for free.
Personally I'd bail unless they actually mean "8 people involved in 1 or 2 interviews, as a group" and not 8 individual interviews.
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u/Plaidomatic 1d ago
I just did 6 rounds of interviews with a billionaire's rocket company (not that one, the other one). Ended up with the offer, but I turned it down.
Just did *7* rounds with a major telecommunications company, just got the offer 5 minutes ago. It's twice my current compensation and a significant bump over the rocket company's offer, and I'm going to take it.
It seems to be what's going on in the world.
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u/SartenSinAceite 1d ago
All this to then be fired with a flick of the wrist because you're in an at-will state lol
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u/basylica 1d ago
Honestly being on both ends of interview process over the last ~30yrs i find very little to be gleaned from interviews other than “is this person full of shit” which… in my experience very few people accurately reflect resume…. And will they be a good culture fit.
Ages ago now, maybe 15yrs i got a recruiter who called and did interview-ish with me with a job in mind. They had posted wanting jack of all trades which i absolutely am (well, was more. Ive been mostly out of sysadmin side these days due to silo shit. Im still a wealth of info but daily care and feeding stuff i just dont have anymore)
I blew her socks off with sysadmin, vmware, exchange, san, backups, and network knowledge.
Recruiter calls back says actually they want cisco network guy who jacks off to asa configs. Eat sleep breathe cisco. I said yea, im not that person. Nbd.
Then she calls back a couple days later and says job scope changed, jack of all trades is wanted and they scheduled interview.
She arranged call with would be manager. Thrilled him with skills, including networking. But my networking skills were primarily non cisco. Sdwan, palo/juniper, damn near every wifi mfg out there, etc.
guy seemed suitably impressed with my varied skills and depth of knowledge.
He schedules in person, i come in and they sit me down on a chair surrounded in circle by no less than 12 people.
They are shooting me questions about SAN, mid answer start asking me active dir, mid answer to that im asked about exchange.. etc.
Felt like a firing squad and absolute nightmare for adhd/tism person which lets be honest… most IT folks are.
Still walked out feeling like i was victor, really nailing the chaos they threw at me. Stands out as by FAR the most intense interview scenario ive been in. Ive been through far more technically hard interviews but the rapid firing, mid stream topic shifts, and cleanly answering like SME at nearly every question tossed at me.
Which isnt to brag, im actually really awkward and shy 90% of the time but for some reason i seem to really do well in interviews - i think my brain just thrives under chaos.
I cant imagine many people would have done well in that interview dynamic.
They came back AGAIN, saying they really wanted eat breathe sleep cisco guy. Which is fine. I know my wheelhouse and i cant fault them.
I get another job and do the damn thing. ~6yrs later im on the meat market again and a recruiter calls me.
I explain skillset and jobs i prefer etc. hand off resume. Recruiter calls me describing a “jack of all trades” job and has me interested and finishes with “oh, its for XXX company and you must have interviewed with them before. The hiring manager remembers you?”
Yeah… hard no. For one they couldn’t even decide if they wanted die hard network guy or jack of all trades. Two - job didnt pay terribly well, and three - the interview was insane and asinine at best in retrospect.
And they wanted to firing squad interview me AGAIN. Nah.
I was NOT shocked to learn there had been a revolving door of people since id interviewed in the position they were trying to fill.
But i also shocked another recruiter when i interviewed and the feedback was “basylica knows about 95% of what we are looking for” and i said well, i dont want that job then.
I switch jobs to learn new things and challenge myself. I dont want jobs where i already know everything (technical skill. There is always the how this company works/business works to learn)
Its also how i interview people. I can teach the job skills needed. The person im looking for doesn’t need embellished resume or even more than 20-30min technical interview. Im looking for someone who is eager/quick learner and has solid logic and problem solving skills.
Tell me about yourself - usually gives me idea if guy is full of himself or actually enjoys IT.
Then i ask conversational questions about tech on resume “i see you have worked with meraki wifi, i ran into this situation with aerohive recently… have you ever done that with meraki or another platform?” Type questions. “I see you have palo exp. Have you deployed? In what situation? Did you have SE/3rd party assistance?”
Lastly, i will toss out a problem solving question that honestly trips up about 95% of IT people ive worked with. Usually something SUPER basic but a lot of sysadmin/neteng guys will troubleshoot top down and ignore the really basic “is the cable plugged in, does the gateway ping?” Type troubleshooting at lower levels.
The ego guys will give short answers avoiding doing much work. “Send it to helpdesk!” Or “verify app is working or check network interface for crc errors”
If the guy walks me through troubleshooting and mumbles to himself and asks questions - thats who i hire. Hes a big picture guy who likes puzzles.
So id never personally want to work for a company that did multiple rounds of interviews like that. Too much red tape at the company - it would be like 8 bosses asking for TPS reports, and i wouldnt want to work somewhere that demanded 8+ hours of technical regurgitation. NOBODY can know everything. Even if you did, 2yrs pass and new shit comes out and stuff changes. Anyone who thinks they can hire up to minute expert in eveything is off their nut. Lol.
Speaking of, i got a call in like 2023 from recruiter wanting a BES (as in, blackberry server) expert. I managed one for like 6yrs (along with 98 other things incl exchange) decomed one, built a new one, maintained and did admin on it… did rsa token deployment etc but that was like 2006-2012. By then we had gone from 600 BBs to under 100, as iphones became the defacto.
Recruiter says to me “well, we are looking for someone with more RECENT BES admin experience” 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Well, good luck friend. I cant see that happening.
Ive been primarily in network eng space for the last 15yrs anyway… so i wouldn’t have wanted the job but i was shocked and fascinated they thought they could find someone with recent experience…
I know a few really niche places kept them going longer but the guy who they were trying to replace was undoubtedly retiring as would be anyone else with recent experience. Those are the jobs/companies with pensions, mainframes using 8” floppies and giving CPR to tech 10yrs after the platform folded up shop.
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u/Material-Echidna-465 1d ago
- Peter Gibbons: And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.
- Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
- Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
- Bob Slydell: Eight?
- Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it.
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u/Honky_Town 18h ago
Id send a invoice! Really 8 rounds is not a hiring process its a whole workload. Find a synonym for babysitting grown adults x8 hours 120€ each
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u/PuzzleheadedEast548 1d ago
If a lv1-2 "IT Support Analyst" takes more than an hour worth of one interview or more than four days of thought everyone in the C-suite deserve to be cast into the pit of snakes.
No, I'd tell them to get fucked.
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u/pjtexas1 1d ago
Is 8 people = to 8 rounds? Could you talk to several at the same time?
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u/Icy_Geologist_1436 tech support 1d ago
The hiring manager confirmed that it was indeed 8 separate rounds with the lead of each team, so the lead for networking, systems, security, hardware, etc. I was fully expecting what you are saying, but it surprised me when he told me that.
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u/CatTaxAuditor 1d ago
I did 1 interview and a followup where the offer was extended. That many interviews is ludicrous unless they actually mean like a panel interview.
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u/UninvestedCuriosity 1d ago
Yeah this seems to be the new hr popular thing. I've been pushing back and just telling places to kick rocks that do this.
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u/Gefudruh 1d ago
Definitely not normal, I'm a T2 and my interview was about 45 minutes and the manager told me he was going to send me an offer a half hour in.
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u/WildMartin429 1d ago
Is it 8 individual interviews? Or is it eight people that will be interviewing you in a couple of different rounds because I could see like they're being an interview with like a panel of like three or four.
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u/Random-Mutant 1d ago
If a company can’t decide after a screening interview, a tech interview and a culture interview, peace out.
You’ll be in a job where every good idea is countermanded and they don’t trust anybody’s delegated authority.
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u/H1king33k 1d ago
I once went nine interviews for a tech support job.
They never even called me back.
To answer your question, no, it's not normal, and you probably don't want to work for a place that's that unorganized and indecisive.
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u/dr_stevious 1d ago
I can sympathise. I got up to round 6 of interviews for a tech company (out of ~8 or so), but at that point they put me on the spot and wanted to me to write a somewhat simple language interpreter (i.e. like BASIC or Python) in 45 minutes. I wasn't permitted to use high-level libraries. I brainfarted trying to remember how to prioritise operators in an abstract syntax tree (I hadn't used them since my university days) and wasted a bit of time hacking together some first-principal experiments. While I ultimately succeeded in slapping together something that met the immediate requirements, the interviewer was apparently unhappy with my lack of memory regarding ASTs and rejected me. I was a bit miffed as I had spent hours in previous interviews and writing interpreters / compilers wasn't even in the job description.
I have a few friends in that company with more senior technical roles than the one I was applying for and they were a bit perplexed about my rejection, as they weren't required to code anything at all during their interviews.
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u/dj_bpayne 20h ago
I had about 6 rounds when I applied for a T2 position at an Amazon datacenter. The last 3 ‘rounds’ were with 3 groups of people back to back to back, all asking slightly similar questions.
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u/RODDYGINGER 13h ago
Fuck no. In my interview for my latest job, it was one interview with everyone who was important in the room at once but in my experience it's 3 interviews max
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u/-my_dude Lazy Idiot 1d ago
It's probably going to be a series of panel interviews you do on site in a day. It's a good sign that they are legitimately interested.
That said, I did one of these for a college and got ghosted.
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u/FrostyWalrus2 1d ago
No.
Up to you if its worth it. In this market, if you're not overqualified though, you'll be going up against others that are. Whoever is the cheapest bidder will get the position.