Comment by ichydkrsrnae

In your mind you imagine an HR professional planning your loop, interviewers that are genuinely interested in you, a hiring manager who's carefully read your resumé and has specific questions about your experience. You just (wasted|spent) five or six years and $200,000 on your four year degree. They better be interested, right?

Not.

In reality, a hiring manager clicked on your resume because an algorithm suggested it, told HR to setup a loop, and then promptly forgot you until the day you showed up.

If you're one of the lucky ones, your resume might have actually been read by a human.

The interviewers on the loop are probably not even on the team you'll join if hired.

There's a 90% chance they haven't even read the job requisition for the position you're applying for, if they could even find it. I've had to interview people blind without requisition or resume, and yes I did feel like an idiot both times, a rude one.

The person sitting across from you asking questions probably first learned of your very existence 15 minutes before it began; not because of disinterest, but because HR assigned the interview with that short of a window! re: x out sick, y in important meeting, etc.

All of this is true for at least 2 FAANGs and 1 MSFT in my experience as an interviewer and interviewee on over 50 loops over a decade.

What I'm saying is there is no spit or polish to the hiring process, not even at competitive companies, not even at the big ones, perhaps especially so because the assumption will be that you actually know what you're doing since you were bold enough to apply and even bolder to attend an interview loop at one of these "amazing" companies.

The musical chairs you experienced at Stripe, if explained at all, will be calendar conflicts, meeting overruns, sick employees, fire drills within, etc., all of those ambiguities that constantly interrupt IT. The show doesn't stop within because you're being interviewed on Wednesday. You are not the show. That $1000 suit you're wearing, the only suit you'll ever buy or ever wear ever again, bought you 60 minutes (or 20 at Stripe for Mgr of Mgrs).

The real explanation you will never know, but something as facile as the third guy on the loop not liking the fact that you have a full head of hair and he has none is actually sufficient, if you understand what I mean, that hiring is messy and opaque and human and, therefore, often ridiculous.

Would you believe one of these companies has had for decades now, as a core competency to hire for, “A tolerance for ambiguity”? I always loved that one.