I've never had such a panel interview in my quite long career and possibly never will. I'm not allocating a whole day for an interview, that job offer isn't likely to be that much better than the current job or other alternatives to justify jumping through such hoops.
If you want me to do work for you and judge me on that, I'm available as a contractor.
You have never had an all day interview? Not even onsite?
That’s weird. Seriously. That’s weird. Every job I have had in my 20+ year engineering career had a multihour interview panel. I’m talking like at least four separate hour long interviews all on the same day. Big company. Small company. It literally didn’t matter.
And you’re saying this has never happened to you? I have to ask, what has been your typical interview experience been, and how tiny are these places?
I did just literally say that this has never ever happened to me. Likely that's a regional thing, perhaps panel interviews are popular in USA - but my practice has always been 1-3 rounds of <1 hour interviews, at various sized places including a multinational bank (where I also did many interviews from the hiring side both for technical and nontechnical roles, but it always was ~3 rounds of <1hour interviews with no take-home tasks; if more people were needed, they were included at one of the interview rounds, not as extra time), a major government institution, and a matured tech ex-startup - and while your question was reasonable, IMHO framing your prejudicial assumptions as "how tiny are these places" was an unprovoked insult that's not entirely appropriate.
No. You earned the “tiny” comment. You started with being super arrogant, on a site known for arrogance, known for people flexing about how they get their jobs from their friends, on a site that you know is not only being very US centric, but very Dan Francisco centric, speaking on a very common topic here. Legitimately, the only reason beyond nepotism I could come up with for your very strange experience was you never worked anywhere larger than 3 people. Again, something that is quite common on this site.
At some point, you have to wonder when know you’re the odd one out, but you didn’t. That’s on you.
Frankly, I think the only place such interview panels or loops really make sense is in something like Product Management, where you might need to interface well with Sales, Marketing, Engineering, UX, executives.