How do you fit 3 on-sites and 6 interviews per day? Even if your onsites were 1 hr long and they offered you a job after a single interview, you still have to drive back and forth to each location. How did you have time for the 6 phone screens per day?
Each successive stage is more time intensive, but there were also fewer of them. There's a lot of noise, especially in the beginning, so a lot drop off very quickly. From there, it was just a matter of tightly packing the schedule and doing it from day to night.
Like I said, the "you'll be homeless again very soon" factor was a big one for me.
"Each successive stage is more time intensive, but there were also fewer of them."
You just said you had 25 onsites. Unless you knew beforehand that you were going to cut out of them early, there's no way you could have scheduled 3 per day. And at 6 phone screens per day, the last 2-3 days worth of phone screens occurring near the end of the 1.5 week period would not have been able to produce an onsite within 1 or 2 days, therefore, that means most of the 40 phone interviews must have been front loaded in those 1.5 weeks, with the onsites being back-end loaded. Which means that your density of onsites would have been higher than 3 per day.
It's a great story, but you should use more realistic numbers next time.
Each "technical interview" I've been to is about 3-6 hrs. I've yet to see a Silicon Valley technical interview where it's not at least 3 hrs, meeting with 3 people. So right there, fitting 25 "next stage" interviews in 1.5 weeks is bullshit.
Where is he going to find the time for 40 initial phone interviews? That requires talking with the recruiter, and then the recruiter scheduling time with a developer. Anyone who has realistically interviewed in Silicon Valley knows that recruiters are very slow, and things tend to get muddled up very easily.
In 1.5 weeks, assuming they don't interview on weekends, that's 6 1-hr phone screens, plus 3 on-site interviews per day. The logistics simply don't work. It's a complete lie. If he had said 1 month, then it still would have been impossible with 1.5 phone screens and 1 on-sites per day, but it would have been slightly more believable than 1.5 weeks.