Seven Stages. Four Hours. The Marathon Nobody Signed Up For.

A recruiter sent a candidate the interview roadmap: a forty-five-minute phone screen, a thirty-minute coding assessment, a sixty-minute hiring manager call — and then a four-hour final loop spread across multiple days, with four separate sixty-minute sessions on System Design, Coding, Interaction and Impact, and Product and Delivery. Seven stages total. Reddit erupted. One commenter distilled the consensus: "If you need this many interviews to decide on an applicant, you're a dumbass. You at most need two and a very short screening call."