This speaks to how deranged mainstream software hiring practices are.
To wit: take a bunch of practitioners more or less at random and arrange to have them serially interview candidates. Apply virtually no structure to the interviews themselves; most of those practitioners will be free to generate their own questions, and if any guidance is given at all, it will usually take the form of "assess the candidate's abilities along axes X, Y, and Z" (for "X" of the form "Rails" or "Django" or whatever, &c). To that haphazard scheme, strongly imply that those practitioners are not merely expert at assessing the abilities of others (something that does not follow from the mere observation that the practitioners themselves are competent in the field), but also psychologists capable of extracting from a 45 minute adversarial interview the "culture" and mentality of candidates who are so nervous and upset from being judged by hostile strangers in this crapshoot process.
Software hiring is widely regarded by hiring managers as a nearly random process; at best, at savvy companies, the house might have an edge over time. And the cost of that edge is a system that is inhumane to virtually everybody, with the possible exception of a small elite of sought-after developers.
To wit: take a bunch of practitioners more or less at random and arrange to have them serially interview candidates. Apply virtually no structure to the interviews themselves; most of those practitioners will be free to generate their own questions, and if any guidance is given at all, it will usually take the form of "assess the candidate's abilities along axes X, Y, and Z" (for "X" of the form "Rails" or "Django" or whatever, &c). To that haphazard scheme, strongly imply that those practitioners are not merely expert at assessing the abilities of others (something that does not follow from the mere observation that the practitioners themselves are competent in the field), but also psychologists capable of extracting from a 45 minute adversarial interview the "culture" and mentality of candidates who are so nervous and upset from being judged by hostile strangers in this crapshoot process.
Software hiring is widely regarded by hiring managers as a nearly random process; at best, at savvy companies, the house might have an edge over time. And the cost of that edge is a system that is inhumane to virtually everybody, with the possible exception of a small elite of sought-after developers.