Part of the problem is that Manton the interview panel do feel like they're wasting their time. It is valuable to the company but for the engineers, they want to get back to coding or whatever else they are working on.
It isn't fair to the person applying because they didn't pick the people on the panel, but if the one doing the interviewing doesn't hide their feeling it's obviously not great.
That's true. I want to say that that's Google's fault right? Because not everybody is on the team you're interviewing for (I might be wrong)? At Apple you are interviewed by the team, who presumably needs another person to assist them.
Also, regardless of whether or not they want to be there, it's a bad look for the company. Somebody took a day off to talk to you, it's only fair that an interviewer reciprocates
Can confirm everything you said is true and that at Google you'll likely never see your interviewers once you start working there but at Apple you'll be working with your interviewers on a daily basis.
It has upsides and downsides, like as you said you had to go through 3 different on-sites (one for each team), but you'll get a good sense of the team before getting an offer (and they'll get a good sense of you). I like the Apple method much better but I had an unusually bad Google interview process so it's possible other people had better experiences.
> at Google you'll likely never see your interviewers once you start working there
Can confirm that this is largely true, with an asterisk.
The interview panel (for SWE candidates) is indeed drawn at random, but it's becoming more and more common to conduct fit interviews for specific roles. This is usually done by the hiring manager, in rare cases also involving other people (e.g. the tech lead).
The good thing about interviewing with your teammates is they will be invested in making it success if they recommended you. If you never see the interviewer again then they have no skin in the game.
Some of the difficulty is that the team may be hiring people because they're currently under-staffed. I've been on teams before where we're 3 engineers on a team that we're trying to hire up to 6 people. It's really hard to both try to keep up the work of 2 people, even in maintenance, and spend hours every week on trying to hire the replacements. Even if the company is good about reducing demands for new work after a departure, it's generally true that you're hiring BECAUSE you need more people on the team, which often means that team is overworked already.
It isn't fair to the person applying because they didn't pick the people on the panel, but if the one doing the interviewing doesn't hide their feeling it's obviously not great.