If that actually is the case, I could see myself happily telling the company to not waste my time, but if they really have an offer, let's hear it.
Except there is no guarantee you will get the job.
Assuming one will interview in 10's of companies, that's a lot of hours to waste.
> Honestly, your post suggests that maybe you don’t really respect this company, from their use of your library through the fact that they want you to go through the same interview process as other candidates (important for accurate hiring decisions as well as fairness). If you’re digging deep for excuses to dislike them already, maybe you aren’t a good fit for this job.
Please don't jump into conclusions about OP.
It's unreasonable because they, 1) have the OP's open source project to assess his technical abilities, and 2) they approached the OP, not the other way around.
Sometimes people really do just want to see if you've memorized Cracking the Coding Interview, and that sucks, but often it's more "can you work out a reasonable solution to this problem in a reasonable way, and tell me about it". We don't know the details here, but I'm guessing all this company said was "four interviews, and one of them will be a technical whiteboarding exercise". I believe you can still get a lot of insight out of a whiteboarding session even if you know for a fact the candidate can write good code.
There are other options, like "tell me about a challenge you've faced" or just talking through a particular project on the resume, but the interviewer might want to have actual code to talk about, because that's a particular set of problem solving and communication skills that another conversation might not get at. I think that's legitimate.
16 hours interview loops are very much not standard practice in the industry. And frankly 100M funding isn't nearly as strong bragging point as companies seem to believe. Established companies offering north of 400k in TC don't do 16 hour loops for SWE IC level, so if you're doing those sorts of long loops, you better have an unbelievably good offer ready (like an upgrade to director-of-technology level or something along those lines).
Put it this way: the best candidates are pretty much always employed, so if you're trying to get cute with interviewing practices, they will pass you by because you're not the only employer in town, and they know the market and they know what they're worth.
So, if you are reaching out to me, and want that much of my time to resolve your business question that I didn't cone to you for at all (whether its “should we hire you” or anything else), you should offer me at least ~1/125 of the job's annual compensation for my service.
Likewise, since the company will be spending so much money on you it's worth it for them to pay you $1,0000 for 8 hours or, worst case, $2,000 for 16 hours. After all, it can save them a lot of money in the long run from hiring a bad candidate.
Honestly, what else would you want them to do? Send an impersonal letter?
> Then they go on and explain i’d have to do 4 more meetings 1-2 hours each, including a leetcode-style tech interview
Even 4x2 hour interviews is still only 8 hours. Let’s call it 16 hours, worst case, to account for the disruption and setup time as well as small talk.
Even 16 hours is only equivalent to 2 days of this new job. If you’re going to be spending 200 days per year working side by side with these new people, you want to take advantage of this time to see how they work, how they interact with you, and how compatible you are with them.
Potentially unpopular opinion on HN, but I don’t see this as unreasonable. This job could last for a long time. The interview, even with four sessions, will not.
> In my head i’m thinking: “If their leetcode-engineers are that good why do they have rely on my open-source?”
Because no company should be writing things from scratch when viable open-source alternatives are available?
Honestly, your post suggests that maybe you don’t really respect this company, from their use of your library through the fact that they want you to go through the same interview process as other candidates (important for accurate hiring decisions as well as fairness). If you’re digging deep for excuses to dislike them already, maybe you aren’t a good fit for this job.