Besides the questions, you get interviewed by recruiters. The recruiter, very likely a person that has never done anything technical, been in a technical team, delivered products/features under tight timelines...

Companies do not want their engineers and product people spending time interviewing prospects, so they throw recruiters at the problem and end up frustrating and wasting the time of other engineers. Like, it's your problem, not ours.

If a recruiter reaches out and I'm interested, I ask to talk to someone technical.

There's flaws in the ways a lot of companies hire, but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.

This is how most jobs are filled. The 3rd party recruiters, the online job boards, the e-applications on the company's website, they're a smoke screen. They are how they get to say they are an "equal opportunity employer".

Most places won't give interviews to 99% of the people coming in cold. They are mostly used as a pool of beards to make the hiring process look open when they have someone on recommendation for a job. They'll pick the 3 best resumes out of the pool and then put them through the impossible technical interview. They will fail and all that is left is the person with the recommendation.

When I was involved in hiring I was astonished at how difficult it was to even find a person who was both worth interviewing and willing to interview, and resumes were basically worthless at helping you make that determination.

Resume did not matter at all. The hiring pool is flooded with a thousand bootcampers, 1 in 40 can actually program and its impossible to tell who they are without conducting a remote. A thousand people with Masters degrees in comp sci, 1 in 50 can actually program and most of them don’t even seem to have any interest in programming.

Then there are unfortunate language barriers, where a large percentage of the pool are international but your company doesn’t have anyone who can interview them adequately.

There’s a reason finding tech hires has become its own industry and we all get spammed 10x daily. It’s because it’s really, really difficult and time-consuming and exhausting and expensive to make a good tech hire, and the cost of making one of your first 5 or 10 engineering hires a bad one can literally be that your company just fails.

It’s just so hard to hire software developers. I’ve been on both sides so I know how frustrating the situation is for devs, but I don’t think it’s half as frustrating as being on the hiring side of it. It’s just so fucking hard and exhausting. Even beyond the logistics of it, you’re spending all your time judging people’s economic worth and sending emails that you know will ruin their day. It’s just not a fun job at all.

In the best case where you have a technically skilled interviewer and interviewee, there is still the problem of: 'the correct answer is my answer. Even if yours also works, it is not my answer.'

Tech hiring is not difficult, but it requires the following traits in the interviewer:

1. Broad technical skills and the ability to recognize skills in others.

2. Ego is not driving them. No need to be smarter than everyone.

3. Conversational/interpersonal skills to get the interviewee to talk, and to recognize someone who will be a jerk.

The common assumption is that skilled tech people lack interpersonal skills, but in my experience 1&2 is the rare combination.

Also most of these companies have policies which don't allow any feedback to be given on interview performance. In light of that the recruiter saying "you don't have necessary skills" is extremely surprising.

I have been rejected many, many, many times because the first screening (CV check by non-technical recruiter). My last example was at a well know tech startup were I had to hack my way to get noticed in order to get the first interview. The funny thing is that I was the fasted candidate to get hired + I won a company-wide award for my work at the company just 4 months after joining.

I haven't finished a degree because I thought was boring and I was learning things I already taught myself before, but this fact makes my resume go down the list very fast. Because interviewers don't have time to lose and thousands of candidates to check I'm sure they will find very useful the use of technology on getting those good prospects in front of everyone else.

Something I've seen many times at my past jobs is having good technical applicants, some of them are even referred by one team member and are turned down later because culture. I don't know why but engineers and technical people are more likely to fail at those than others. The surprising thing is that they check culture as the last step because those who can run those type of interview are a few and can't become full-time culture keepers. This is an enormous waste of time and resources for the applicant, the interviewers and the company itself.

And yet they still interview you like they're pretending to be SpaceX or NASA or something. 5+ hours of programming brainteasers (which they swear are just 'simple programming exercises' that 'are just to give insight into process' -- but are actually brainteasers, and you are actually expected to solve on site).

Which makes the inevitable "we like you, but have to pass on you for technical merit" rejection sting pretty badly -- I have the technical capability to handle these jobs, because I already do this same work every day. But I get told my technical knowledge isn't strong enough to work on their apps, because of stumbling on some of the latest trick questions.

And then, their managers write a blog post on Medium and complain about the lack of tech talent, or how they are inundated with fake applicants who "can't code FizzBuzz"

sigh

Technical hiring is just totally screwed up, and no one seems remotely interested in fixing it.

1. He noted that this wasn't in an engineering field (which I would presume to include programming :) ).

2. A technical interview is hardly a panacea against bad hiring decisions. It's just the least crappy way to hire people that anyone's found (that I know of).

The problem is not that the job candidates are not sufficiently informed about the way specific employers conduct interviews. The problem is that employers have expectations regarding the tech jobs market that start at merely unrealistic and progress beyond a complete schizophrenic break with two extra hits of LSD.

We are not re-inventing the tech interview. We are, in the style of Thomas Edison searching for a better incandescent filament, discovering 10000 ways that are worse than the existing standard.

Ok, sure, there are some companies out there that don't know what they are doing, and the very most prestigious companies have to do some very tedious stuff to deal with the fact that their process gets leaked and people are willing to put a ton of effort into preparation.

But mostly, it's pretty reasonable:

- Little reliance on credentials, because there are many solid candidates that didn't go to top schools or don't have CS degrees or maybe didn't go to post-secondary school at all.

- There's some sort of technical interview that asks the candidate to show they can do the work by doing a small amount of work. They usually let candidates choose the language and tools they'll use for this, offer help if the candidate gets stuck, let them look things up on the web, etc. This can take a few different forms, but it's inevitable given that credentials aren't reliable.

- There's some sort of "behavioural" interview that asks about how a candidate collaborates and communicates with coworkers. Tech companies aren't looking for the anti-social genius anymore; software requires teamwork.

- Recruiters are typically very accommodating of a candidates' circumstances. They'll tailor the pace and scheduling of interviews to the candidates' needs, fly them in from other cities, reserve time in interviews to answer candidate questions, and generally put significant and explicit effort into making the "candidate experience" as positive and low-stress as possible.

- There's a lot effort put into eliminating biases, and interviewers will often do things like not reading a candidate's resume until after the interview, or writing up their report before talking with other interviewers about the candidate. Most tech companies really want to do this right.

I think that what tech companies ask of candidates is quite fair. These are high-paying (sometimes very high-paying), high-prestige, comfortable jobs with lots of perks. The company puts a lot of time and money into training new hires before they're productive, and it'll be even more time before they can tell if the new employee was a good hire or not. In other words, the cost of hiring the wrong person is very high.

It started with algorithmic interviews. Then, we tried take home assignments. Now, lots of companies are doing pair programming type scenarios including a code review for a more accurate representation of a day on the job. Still, there hasn't been this silver bullet companies are looking for to solve their hiring woes.

I don't know the solve. There's also a large problem with those doing the interviewing being either untrained or unempathetic to the candidates.

We need good data based approaches to tech interviews to move the discourse forward; I really like triplebyte's talks and blog posts on how to hire, and what they mainly point out is that a good interview process provides a decent signal on how successful an employee will be.