Depending on what you're hiring for, it's really not all that depressing.
If someone has been doing maintenance programming in a company without excellent culture that values code quality - their brains start to rot pretty quickly.
Five years later, they know how to debug, estimate, work on a team, just not really develop anything from scratch or think critically.
If you want people to do real development, those are hard to come by. If what you really need is someone to maintain some bloated codebase and make it worse, but not too fast, then most people will do just fine.
Another thing is: what do you really want from a candidate? What led you to start asking them trivia questions in the first place?
The really good ones will be put off by trivia because it brings them zero value. If you ask questions that actually pertain to the field you're hiring for, it'll go over much better.
For example I applied to work at a major bank, and got asked a bunch of security questions, which exposed me not understanding how main in the middle attacks worked. The interviewee had requested that I go home, do a bit of research and email them the answer.
This brought them value because they found out that's an area I have little knowledge in, and it provided me with value because it pointed me in the right place to go research.
Trivia puzzles don't add value to anyone. Frankly if you're doing trivia and are upset by the response you're getting, a part of that is your fault :)
If someone has been doing maintenance programming in a company without excellent culture that values code quality - their brains start to rot pretty quickly.
Five years later, they know how to debug, estimate, work on a team, just not really develop anything from scratch or think critically.
If you want people to do real development, those are hard to come by. If what you really need is someone to maintain some bloated codebase and make it worse, but not too fast, then most people will do just fine.
Another thing is: what do you really want from a candidate? What led you to start asking them trivia questions in the first place?
The really good ones will be put off by trivia because it brings them zero value. If you ask questions that actually pertain to the field you're hiring for, it'll go over much better.
For example I applied to work at a major bank, and got asked a bunch of security questions, which exposed me not understanding how main in the middle attacks worked. The interviewee had requested that I go home, do a bit of research and email them the answer.
This brought them value because they found out that's an area I have little knowledge in, and it provided me with value because it pointed me in the right place to go research.
Trivia puzzles don't add value to anyone. Frankly if you're doing trivia and are upset by the response you're getting, a part of that is your fault :)